Worldbuilding doesn't and shouldn't matter.

I’ve increasingly come to feel there is nothing people should care about as an “objective criticism” less than “Bad Worldbuilding”. 

When the Worldbuilding in something is genuinely well thought out and holds up under scrutiny that’s a neat bonus, I love watching YT videos about the hidden depths of the lore in ASOIAF as much as anyone else who only watched the TV shows. But it should not be a requirement and certainly not an end in and of itself, and I kinda feel like what’s happened to that very franchise proves my point. 

Tolkien was a worldbuilder like none before him because he spent 20 years writing about this fantasy world just for himself before he actually published anything set in it. And even then he still had to partially rewrite The Hobbit later when he fully integrated it into Arda’s overarching history. Chances are you have not read the book that was published in 1937. 

I don’t care whether or not the world of a story makes sense, I care whether the characters are people I like spending time with and then if the story being told with them is compelling. And if anything related to worldbuilding as a concept affects my ability to enjoy a story, it’s not how detailed the history is, or how unique or unlike other fantasy worlds it is, or whether its internal logic really makes that much sense. As I explained in my post on why I couldn’t get into Magic Knight Rayearth it’s whether or not the world actually feels alive and lived in, like the people playing specific roles in the story are not the only real people in it. 

I saw someone say how a particular Urban Fantasy Pet Peeve of theirs is when the Economy doesn't make sense, and then went on about all the math they did regarding some story's Economy. The fact that you put more thought into this silly thing to even care about in the first place than the author did doesn’t make you a better writer than them. 

Update June 3rd 2026: Premise

So I watched a Video Essay titled How this Cabbage almost DESTROYRD Anime by I don't mind rotting (UOYKAHNTON). And their plot description of the 2005 Visual Novel Yoake Mae Yori Ruri Iro Na shortened Yoakena and translated Brighter Than the Dawning Blue, got me to thinking. 

The setting is centuries in the Future where a catastrophic war between The Earth and The Moon caused technological development to revert back to 2005, or as this video theorizes it originally plunged society back further and the present narrative is just when they caught back up to 2005.

Like a number of VN premises, it's a transparently contrived premise, the worldbuilding is only there to create the setting the writers want. It's a way to get a setting that they can in large part write as if it's set in the present but still have some Sci-Fi stuff going on.  And it's that kind of worldbuilding that critics of "Bad Worldbuilding' so often call lazy worldbuilding. Because no you realistically you can't get almost the exact cultural conditions of 2005 Tokyo from a different history leading up to it just like you wouldn't get something resembling 2017 Los Angelus with a point of divergence that starts 2000 years ago.

Yes I'm really defending Bright right now, I haven't seen the movie itself yet, but I feel bad about having ever passively agreed with Lindsay Ellis's video on it.

The people who made that movie wanted to make a movie that's a modern LA Buddy Cop Movie but with Orcs and Elves, I think the correct thing to do when criticizing this movie whether you like it or not is to simply accept that premise instead of being mad that they didn't create a completely different alternate history.  

Sub Eras of The Isekai Era

I feel like I have a unique perspective on understanding this timeline of events. 

First I’m aware there is a long history of Anime that can be described as Isekai before this era.  This is about the distinctly modern trend of Isekai as we currently know it being one of the most prolific and defining genres of the current state of Anime. 

Winter 2013 through Spring 2017 is a time when there is already a visible increase in Anime that can be described as Isekai, as well as non-Isekai Fantasy Anime becoming increasingly more beholden to JRPG Gamer logic. 

But from what I recall the English speaking fandom wasn’t using the word “Isekai” all that often yet, all the AniTube videos talking about shows we now call Isekai that I’ve seen from this period did not use the word, it wasn’t in videos on relevant shows from TrixieTheGoldenWitch, Mother's Basement or Gigguk.

This was also an era when there not only were still Fantasy Anime without this Gamer Vibe but they weren't inherently less common either. Spring 2017 has two highly underrated Fantasy shows I would not even remotely classify as even Quasi-Isekai, Grimoire of Zero and WoldEnd: What do you do at the end of the world? Are you busy? Will you save us?. It’s not that those kinds of Anime ever stopped, some like them still get made, but I do think this was the last time we got two in one season.

And almost every proper Isekai from this era is among those that most who’ve seen them consider among the good ones, whether it’s the highly popular instant classics like, Log Horizon, No Game No Life, Overlord, Konosuba, Re:Zero, and Tanya The Evil, or very distinct hidden Gems like Problem Children, Outbreak Company and Grimgar: Ashes and Illusions.  The most disliked Isekai from this era is Gate, which was disliked not for being seen as “generic” but for its politics, and even then Gate was still a very popular show. 

Summer 2017 was the beginning of the Isekai era in full force, In Another World With My Smartphone is the first Anime to truly have all of the vibes of a "generic Isekai” which I say as someone who unconditionally loves it. And it was while it and Restaurant to Another World and Knights and Magic were airing that I recall the English Speaking fandom first really started using the word Isekai. And that is when the state of discourse about Isekai entered the form we now know it.  

And I find it fascinating how quickly during that season the narrative became that Isekai is an overused premise people are sick of even though earlier the same year no one was complaining about it. 

I started writing this thinking Fall 2017 was the last season without an Isekai, nor did it have anything I’d call a Quasi-Isekai.  So for that reason you could argue this was still a transitional period and Deathmarch to a Parallel World Rhapsody in Winter 2018 was the start of the full non-stop Isekai bombardment. But the early part of an era can have some stumble in getting off the ground so I was still willing to start this era in Summer 2017 regardless of that.  

However I’d forgotten about Ancient Magus Bride, that show is an Isekai but is like the pre 2017 shows in how pretty highly regarded it is, though I still haven’t watched it. It’s also a Shounen Manga adaptation rather than starting as a Light Novel, so it does still feel like part of the modern Isekai discussion purely by technicality.  There was also Recovery of an MMO Junkie which is part of the undeniably connected yet distinct trend of Anime about playing an MMORPG.

And then double checking myself I saw that there wasn’t an Isekai in Spring 2018, at least not among what I watched, just the somewhat JRPG like Fantasy show Last Period. 

Either way Summer 2017 was still the turning point in my opinion.

And I’d say this era continued into the start of the Pandemic.

About 2021 is when the discourse mutated into a state where some were hoping the trend must be finally almost over while others entered resigned acceptance that this being a consistent part of each season is here to stay.  It’s also in this era that Isekai’s own Sub Genres started being defined in common use even if some of the roots of them were already there. 

Ancient World Fantasy

The most common default setting for a secondary world Fantasy is a Medieval Europe inspired setting, some Fantasy Anime might have a Medieval East Asia aesthetic. 

But settings besides the Middle Ages do exist. We have Space Fantasy or Futuristic Fantasy, the kinds of Fantasy that get confused for Sci-Fi. We have Gaslamp Fantasy which is the Fantasy counterpart to SteamPunk. And Urban Fantasy refers to stories set kind of in the modern world.  And of course settings inspired by the Ancient World also exist. 

But what I wanna talk about here is how Ancient World Fantasy so often defaults to the Bronze Age, at least in the Vibe they give off, they might be using Iron weapons but the Vibe is Bronze Age. From old Italian Sword and Sandal films, to the 90s Sam Raimi Hercules and Xena shows, the obscure 1991 OVA Majuu Senshi Luna Varga, the 2018 Isekai Anime The Master of Ragnarok & Blesser of Einherjar. And then the Fate/Grand Order Babylonia Anime also fits into this lineage. 

The Bronze Age is the largest age of Antiquity, it is about Two Thousand years from over 3300 to 1184 BC, Biblically that’s The Tower of Babel (or you could argue Tubal-Cain in Genesis 4) down to the end of Judges. The thing is the sub ages that can obviously be divided into are not all that distinguished by these kinds of Fantasy Stories. Those Sword and Sandal films will mix and match the Heroic Age of Greek Mythology with Sumeria and Egypt’’s Old Kingdom will look the same as the New Kingdom. 

Exceptions exist, I own some of them, but none of those have made huge impacts on Pop Culture.  At most we could have Classical Antiquity references being meshed into an otherwise Bronze Age aesthetic like 300 or all the Rome stuff in Xena, Xena’s timeline will not ever make real world sense and that’s what’s fun about it. 

One of the key early Trope Codifiers of Ancient Secondary World Fantasy was Conan The Barbarian and other works of Robert E Howard.  Howard was to Ancient World Fantasy what Tolkien is to medieval Europe Fantasy. And that includes how both were not strictly secondary worlds originally, they both technically set their stories in a prehistoric distant past of this world.  But they mark a key transition into modern Secondary World Fantasy because of how the detailed world building made their world seem distinct yet real in ways prior stories doing technically the same thing more vaguely like William Morris stories could not. 

And that's why Fantasy Stories were originally drawing inspiration from the less well documented periods of human history (that’s what the term “Dark Age” originally meant, a period we don’t know much about), and the Bronze age was once even less well documented then it is now. Only once the transition to full Secondary Worlds was complete did writers of Medieval Fantasy realize they could start moving upward into the High Middle Ages and Renaissance for inspiration. But why didn’t Ancient World fantasy do the same?  

Each type of Fantasy Setting began with writers who were to some extent romanticizing the period they are drawing inspiration from, the Fantasy stories with more cynical takes on those time periods came later in response to the stories that first popularized it. 

And in the modern world the kinds of people who romanticize Classical Antiquity do so in a way that is functionally mutually exclusive with telling stories where real Supernatural stuff happens. Classical Antiquity is romanticized by principally New Atheists/Reddit Atheists who pretend the values of rationalism and empiricism were more popular in ancient Greece and Rome then they actually were, that it was a Golden Age of Science and Reason destroyed by the rise of Abrahamic Religion. And when someone like this does want to write a Fantasy Story regardless, we see they still Romanticize the Post Enlightenment era more, like Philip Pullman. 

Now you may think “Christianity was born during Classical Antiquity so wouldn't Christians romanticize it?” but you'd be wrong. The world view of modern Right Wing especially High Church Christians is that Christianity was born into a broken world that needed fixing and the Medieval World was the product of Christianity fixing it.   Liberal Christians (especially Low Church Protestants) believe Christianity was born into a broken world and modern Liberal Democracy is the result of Christianity eventually slowly fixing it.  And a Leftist Christian believes Christianity was born into a Broken world and still hasn’t fixed it yet.  The point is that the context of The Gospel demands that Jesus wasn’t born into the best period of time to be alive Civilizationally speaking. The option I’ve been more willing to consider then most Christians is that there was value in the Hellenistic Civilization that was lost when it fell to the Romans, and the fall of the Hasmonean Kingdom was certainly lamentable, after all Jesus observed Hanukkah in John 10. Ultimately though I am a Leftist with Liberal characteristics.

Atheists however, not all Atheist but the really devout ones who build their personality on being Atheists, have a world view built on inverting the Catholic view and appropriating the Puritan view.

And The Bronze Age is more popular than the Iron Age because it has the quality of being what was Ancient History already to the people of Classical Antiquity.

But another factor is the Western Bias, every time I said "Classical Antiquity" both you and I were first and foremost thinking of the Greeks and Romans more than the Persians or Carthaginians or Parthians or Late Period Egypt or Kushites or the kingdoms of East Asia and Mesoamerica and certainly not the “Barbarians” of Western and Northern Europe.  And when we do we kind of think of them as being aesthetically still in the Bronze Age (which is kinda true for Egypt, they never entered the Iron Age). 

The plot twist I've been building to is that perhaps a different style of Ancient World Fantasy has been hiding in plain sight this whole time.  That Tolkien’s legendarium was actually more Ancient than Medieval all along but pop culture perception has just run with faulty assumptions. 

When early Rings of Power images started coming out I saw one person on Twitter not at all inclined to say nice things about Rings of Power say that at least its costume design is more inline with Tolkien’s actual intent then the Peter Jackson films. Peter Jackson’s costume design went all in on the High Middle Ages when the Third Age of Middle Earth really was Early Middle Ages at the latest. Literally the Norman Conquest is when Tolkien felt everything went wrong.  Eomer shares a name with a 5th century king of the Angles for a reason, the Rohirrim and Rhovanion are meant to be hypothetical ancestors of the pre-migration Anglo-Saxons. 

Even if the Third Age is Medieval, it’s not just Western Europe, Gondor is kind of Byzantium, the rump in South Eastern Europe of the fallen Empire of the West.

The First and Second Ages however are definitely Ancient, they are basically imagining that the Celts had a “Civilization” before the Greeks and Romans. And in so doing it results in Numenor feeling very Roman and Eregion feeling a little Athenian, and I would even call Mordor kind of Sparta how Anti-Spartan Athenians saw them. The Fall of Gondolin was partly based on Troy as many have written about before. 

And capturing all of that is part of why I love Rings of Power, especially season 2. 

BookTuber reviewing classic Fantasy Novels.

The name of the YouTube Channel is The Everyman Reads.

The idea is he's going to review 500 major Fantasy Novels in the order they were written.  He's still very early in the project having just reviewed George MacDonald's Lilith.  And it's a very good video everyone should watch it. 

In this video he defines how he divides Fantasy into 6 Eras. He's probably about right in what his divisions are, but the Pedantic in me can't help but be annoyed by the labels he choose, the point of naming eras after precious Metals is to repeat the Greek Mythological format, Gold then Silver then Bronze and then Iron.  His timeline goes Bronze, Silver, Classic, Golden, Modern and the current recently started not definitively named era.  Which is the other pedantic complaint, Modern is by definition current, if we aren't in the same era as 2005-2020 anymore then that era needs a new name. 

Now as I said when talking about Eras of Anime The Golden Age is the first full era of greatness, but there can be a proto or pre history. So I would call his Bronze Age the formative years, then his Silver Age The Golden Age, then his Classic age the Silver Age and his Golden Age the Bronze Age and his Modern Age the Iron Age.

The 500 books he's selected are naturally biased towards the English speaking canon. And that's fine actually, there is a lot to cover just there. I just want to use this framing as a jumping off point for mentioning some foreign works I feel deserve more credit and attention.  Because what foreign language country's fiction I'm interested in changes depending on the era. 

The first two eras line up well with my Froncophilic interests I hold thanks to CoolFrenchComics.com and BlackCoatPress.

Paul Feval wrote only one book I'm confident can be considered Fantasy enough to definitely count, La Ville Vampire translated into English by the late Brian Stableford as Vampire City, first serialized in the 1860s.  Stuff straddling that transitional line would include some of the works in Anne of The Isles. Some of his books set in modern Paris I would draw inspiration from when writing Urban Fantasy though they wouldn't actually count since the Supernatural element is always left ambiguous, The Vampire Countess, Revenants, Knightshade and The Blackcoats saga whose 6th volume The Companions of The Treasure is in my view the most Tolkienesque thing written before Tolkien. 

The Angel and The Sphinx from 1889 by Eduard Schure and translated by Brian Stableford.

The Enchanted City by Eugene Hennebert from 1893 including in BlackCoatPress's upcoming French Tales of Lost Worlds anthology.

In 1908 and 1909 Gustave Le Rouge wrote two novels that directly anticipate the Barsoom series, these were Translated and published together as Vampires of Mars. 

1919's L'Atlantide is like She in some ways but not in others, the author Pierre Beniot had not read She. But it has had a similar if more forgotten cultural impact, for awhile being directly adapted every decade but also in the name of it's Femme Fatale Antinea influencing even more films.

As far as arguing that 1990-2004 was the best era of Fantasy Prose Novels,  this wouldn't be the only time where what I call The Bronze is also the age I would argue is the best, that's certainly the case with Anime and kind of is for some DC characters. And that is where my Weeb interests come in.  

I haven't read these books, I haven't even seen all the Anime based on them, but I know a lot about their cultural importance.  And these are only stories that were originally Prose Novels which Light Novels count as, I won't be including anything that started as a Manga, Anime, Video Games or Visual Novels though they certainly have plenty of their own contributions to making this an exciting decade and a half for the Fantasy genre.  

The Heroic Legend of Arslan series started in 1987 but continued all through this era. 

Majuu Senshi Luna Varga is referred to as being based on a Light Novel but I can't find any publication dates for it, it's probably the most randomly obscure thing I'm going to list here.  The OVAs came out in 91 so it could turn out to be too soon for this era. 

Slayers started in 1990.

The Twelve Kingdoms started in 1992 and is one of the many GRRMs of Anime source materials in that it's still unfinished. 

On the subject of Urban Fantasy I'm unsure what does and doesn't count but I feel 1998 started a peak era for Japanese Urban Fantasy with Boogiepop and Others in February and the first Kara No Kyoukai in October.  I also recall Trixie The Golden Witch mentioning an anthology book of Light Novels like these from this era called Faust. 

Maybe a short story shouldn't be considered eligible for this but Kinoko Nasu's Angel Notes from 99 is pretty important. 

Scrapped Princess was from 1999 to 2003.

Legend of The Legendary Heroes started in 2002. 

2002 is also the same year as the original Web Novel for Sword Art Online, which isn't a Fantasy novel but has become undeniably important to the history of Fantasy in Japanese media.

Baccano! started in 2003 as did The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya if you count either as Urban Fantasy.

The year 2004 was the start of at least three important Light Novel sagas. 

The Familiar of Zero was very popular and a website that started as a fan site for it would go on to be the main incubation chamber for modern Isekai.

And then two more where I'm unsure if they count as Urban Fantasy for now.  Durarara!! and A Certain Magical Index.

And in December of 2004 Hakubō no Dendōshi by Gen Urobuchi was published. 

Fantasy and Science Fiction

I’ve made a few posts on this blog before the line between Fantasy and Science Fiction and stores that straddle that line.

But I’ve recently come to a final conclusion about how to define these genres that is important.

Science Fiction is defined by what can’t happen in it far more than Fantasy is.  Because the point of Science Fiction is to try and stay theoretically scientifically possible no matter how out there it gets. The supernatural can never unambiguously happen in Sci-Fi. 

But it goes beyond just what literal things can and can’t exist in the universe, there are certain kinds of stories that at their core are Fantasy stories no matter how Futuristic or Scientific you try to make the setting. A Sci-Fi story would never begin with “Once Upon a Time” or something analogous to that. 

Fantasy meanwhile is defined by its lack of limits, anything you can fantasize about can be Fantasy. That’s why I once argued that Sci-Fi can be in its entirety viewed as a subgenre of Fantasy, from a certain point of view. 

However nothing that is at its core a Fantasy story can become Sci-Fi by draping itself in cosmetically Sci-Fi elements like space ships and lasers.  One thing some stories want to do is start as Fantasy but reveal it all to have been Scientific later, but that simply doesn't work, once I see a story as Fantasy no amount of Technobabble can handwave it away. 

And that once again brings us to Star Wars, the most contentious franchise in this debate. 

The Midichlorenes do not make The Force scientific enough to qualify as Sci-Fi, they tie this fundamentally mystical concept to Nature in a way no different then how The Lifestream works in Final Fantasy VII, or Magic Circuits in Fate/.

But what’s really funny is when the Prequel Haters who hate the Midichlorenes for allegedly demystifying The Force also want Star Wars to be allowed to qualify as Sci-Fi.  They fail to see how their interests conflict. 

The people who really want to be allowed to classify Star Wars as Science Fiction are basically insulting Fantasy as a genre, because it’s clear however much they don’t want to outright say it, that this comes from a palace of viewing Sci-Fi as more respectable. 

And it says something about the modern world that in this unique case the younger Genre is viewed as the more respectable one, by some people at least.  Science Fiction as a distinct genre begins with Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein at the absolute earliest. Fantasy meanwhile is the oldest genre there is, The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Mahabharata and Ramayana, the Iliad and the Odyssey, Beowulf and the Mabinogion, Shahnameh, 1001 Arabian Knights, medieval Arthurian and Grail Romances.  All of them are Fantasy stories in a modern genre classification context. 

Andor is the one piece of Star Wars media that feels like it could count as Sci-Fi if only it weren’t in the same Universe as all that Force stuff. And sadly I think that’s a factor in why it’s the closest to universally praised any Disney Era Star Wars project has been. I liked Andor well enough but do consider it overrated, I’d rather have more stuff like Ahsoka and The Acolyte which actually delve into Force Lore. 

So the gist of what I'm saying is, everything that straddles the line will by default by Fantasy. 

A Fantasy World needs to feel Alive in order for me to become invested in it.

Magic Knight Rayearth is in my opinion one of the most overrated Fantasy Anime.  There were some aspects of it I did enjoy, but what really stifled my investment was how the world never felt lived in, our heroes on their journey only ever visited one village.  It really felt like the only people who exist in this world are the ones who play important roles in the story.

And that is one of the most important things in selling a Fantasy Setting to me, it’s what Tolkien and Lewis excelled at and even Game of Thrones took some time to consider.

Whether or not the world actually feels alive, feels like it is filled with people and cultures worth fighting for is more important to me than whether it actually feels “Unique” or distinct from other Fantasy settings.  

This is a factor in why I don’t get tired of the modern trends of Isekai and Quasi-Isekai Anime.  More cynical Anime critics keep mocking how they are all the same discount Dragon Quest worlds, with identical looking medieval towns and D&D Fantasy Races.  But I don’t care because even at their most generic each of those succeeded in making its world feel alive.

This is perhaps one of the most blasphemous opinions you can have in the Anime Community right now, to suggest that one of these Classic Shoujo Isekai, one based on a Manga by the Clamp Team, actually has worse world building then In Another World With My Smartphone.  But that is my honest opinion.  Even the modern Isekai that even I haven't gotten all that into beat Rayearth in this area. 

No one is more disappointed that I was disappointed in a Clamp Anime than I am.  I like Cardcaptor Sakura. I love Angelic Layer, I recall liking the TV Anime version of X and I've enjoyed Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle so far [Update: I also really want a full Anime adaptation of Angel Sanctuary].  So I really expected Rayearth to live up to its hype, but it didn’t. 

Low Church Fantasy

I’ve noticed a trend lately of YouTube videos analyzing how fictional religions in Fantasy settings often don’t feel authentic to how real Regions function, including one focusing specifically on the lack of Schisms. 

So I want to talk about something that perhaps only I care about.

Fantasy religions Aesthetically based on Christianity are always specifically based on High Church Christianity, usually quite specifically Roman Catholicism. More disorganized local spirituality in Fantasy stories are usually more inspired by Animist polytheism like you’d see from Indigenous Tribes of North America or the Sami or local Shintoism. 

This probably has to do with the simplified understanding of Christian History where there is no Protestantism till the Middle Ages are over so therefore it’s assumed Baptist or Quaker inspired communities would be out of place in a Medieval Europe inspired Fantasy Setting.  

However I have seen plenty of Fantasy settings that extend their real word inspirations into the Renaissance, Enlightenment or even Victorian period. Like all those Otome Villainess settings, or really any with a Magic Academy element.

But besides that Medieval Proto-Protestants of different kinds did exist, most relevant here would be the Waldenses/Waldensians. Talking about the Waldenses as Low Church Proto-Protestants is made more controversial than it should be because of how they factor into the imagined revisionist histories proposed by Landmarkists.  I do not believe in the core Doctrine that often lies behind Baptist Successionism theories (that being in the “True Church” requires an unbroken chain of Believers Baptism back to the Disciples), so whether or not there is direct continuity between the Waldenses and 15th Century Anabaptists doesn’t concern me. However I am convinced there is plenty of solid evidence that many Waldenses (they were probably not always all the same) were Credo-Baptists who practiced Congregational Polity. 

There's also the Lollards from English History, some of them were more Low Church then the others, Wycliff himself was certainly not a Credo-Baptist but I think some later Lollards did come to that conclusion.

George MacDonald was a Congregationalist Minister who was a huge player in the origins of the Fantasy Genre being a cited influence on both C.S. Lewis and Tolkien.  The way Goblins tend to be depicted in Fantasy began with him and he also arguably wrote the first Isekai. Unfortunately his influence was filtered through a Catholic and an Anglican. His position on Church Polity is not the deviation from the Established Church of England MacDonald is most well known for, and indeed Universal Salvation is also something I’d like to see in the Fantasy Genre more often.

The major impact this could have on both the Mechanics and Lore of a Fantasy Setting is the question of Apostolic Succession.  

High Church denominations believe the Spiritual Authority Jesus gave the Apostles is only truly inherited by the Clergy, while Low Church Christians believe strongly in the Priesthood of All Believers.  Today most major Baptist denominations are Secessionist on the question of the Spiritual Gifts meaning they believe the more explicitly supernatural manifestations of that authority don’t really happen anymore. However most Pentecostal and Charismatic denominations are also Low Church in form, and the Quakers have their Inner Light doctrine. 

So you could easily still have your Catholic Church like institution be the one wielding the most political power in Society, seeking to restrict the knowledge and use of Healing Magic (and other forms of what a Final Fantasy player would call White Magic) to the Clergy, even having most Adventurer Guilds refuse to give proper Healer licenses to anyone not properly ordained.  While the Low Church Schismatics are teaching that such powers can be called upon by anyone who has Faith. 

People also criticize how passively Pro Monarchy the Fantasy Genre often seems. Well I’ve written before about how Congregationists were the harbingers of modern Democracy and Socialism, so perhaps having some Low Church Schismatics is also how to bring about a Revolution in a Fantasy World?

Baptists and Quakers also have a long history of opposing Slavery, the Southern Baptist Convention were the exception not the general rule. A Fantasy story inspired by the history of The Baptist War in Jamaica could be interesting. 

Update May 17th 2026: I've recently learned that contrary to what I'd long assumed contemporary Japan has more Protestants then Catholics. 

This completely recontextualized the matter of why most Anime don't seem to know non Catholic forms of Christianity exist. 

And it means that the people who write the Web novels that become Light Novels that become Manga that become modern Fantasy Anime really should broaden their horizons. Tokyo has Baptists and Presbyterians and a Non Church Movement. They do have a frame reference for what Low Church Christianity looks like. 

Catholics get more respect because they've been there longer. But so much else in Anime is the product of post Meiji Westernization, it's time Christianity in Anime reflected that too. 

Suppose a Kid from the Last Dungeon Boonies Moved to a Starter Town?

Is the name of a Winter 2021 Fantasy Anime I haven’t watched.  I recall trying to but didn’t finish even the first episode.

However I can’t stop thinking about the title.  The implication of that title is that ‘Starter Town” is functionally synonymous with being a bustling Urban Metropolis and what I recall of the first episode confirms that.

So it confuses me because these LN based Fantasy Anime are operating on a very Meta level, the title implies that because its audience would expect it to be the norm.

But my general experience with the Fantasy Genre is the opposite, the Hero’s Journey usually starts in the Boonies, from The Hobbit and LOTR starting in The Shire to Luke Skywalker growing up on a farm far from the big city on an outer rim planet to Pokémon starting in Pallet Town (which in the Games and Anime seems smaller then it’s real world inspiration) to even Zelda usually starting Link off in some obscure settlement like Kokori Forest, Outset Island or Ordon Village.

But only one of those fits all the requirements for counting as a JRPG and even it is an edge case. 

In Japan the by far most popular JRPG franchise is Dragon Quest with Dragon Quest III specifically being the main blueprint for what most of these Japanese Gamers would think of as a standard RPG formula.  And indeed that adventure does start in the Castle Town where the King lives.

Even the original Final Fantasy also has the first city you visit be the Royal Capital of a Kingdom.  And VII starts in Midgar.

In the Mairo RPGs Mario’s house seems not to be in any town but located very close to Toad Town where Peach’s Castle is located.  The Thousand Year Door starts in Rogueport, a Mos Eisley style port city.

I also notice in Anime about playing MMORPGs you usually spawn in what seems like an Urban Center so that meeting up with other players can be done conveniently.  

And I think that is why RPGs so often depart from the Tolkien set precedent.  RPGs are a kind of game where the Multiplayer form is the original and the Single Player form came later.  The Quest needs to start in a place where players from diverse backgrounds can believably happen to meet up and form a party, like the opening premise of the Anime Ningen Fushin.

The association of the Last Dungeon with the Boonies I still don't get though.

Update December 22nd 2024: Well I have watched it now.

It doesn't really confirm or deny the thesis I originally made this post for. 

The central Meta Gamer Logic Joke is that this MC comes form a late game area and so is overpowered in this early game area without realizing it because in these "boonies" the the most common monsters are stronger then early game bosses.

In a typical RPG you will reach a point where even the lowest Mooks you do battle with technically now have higher states then Bosses you fought early on.  For example in Super Mario RPG the Gu Goombas of Bowser's Keep are stronger then the Hammer Bros of Mushroom Way.  But because the player has leveled up along the way they feel just as easy to one hit KO as regular Goombas.

Update October 2025: I think I do fully get what the title is going for now. 

It's taking the common cultural perception that people who grow up in rural areas are probably tougher then city folk because they grew up in a harsher environment living a more labor intensive lifestyle.   And mapping that neatly onto those RPG conventions I talked about above. 

Baby Yoda and Elves

I love Baby Yoda as much as everyone, but I can’t help but find the concept of being a Baby who can’t even speak yet for over 50 years kind of horrifying, and I’ve seen similar tropes done with the aging process of some Anime Elves.  I remember thinking a more serious world builder would just explain how their very long lived race matures to adulthood at about the same timespan humans do and then their aging slows down dramatically.  

But then I learned that in some of Tolkien's more obscure writings it’s clarified his Elves were also envisioned as taking like 100 years to become adults.  

The growing that we humans experience for the first 25ish years of our lives and the decaying that defines the rest of it are very different biological phenomena, that both can be described as “aging” doesn’t make them the same thing.  So the later being massively slowed or even frozen for a fantasy race doesn’t inherently mean the former has to be slowed as well.

So any Elves in a story written by me would grow up perfectly normally.

Environmentalist Allegories in Sci-Fi and Fantasy have a common recurring problem

From Final Fantasy VII in 1997 to Darling in The Franxx in 2018, but also in between many interpretations of how and why Krypton blew up.  The common tactic is to allegorize it so it’s that Humanity or the Evil Corporations are killing the Earth via what they take out of it, essentially being Parasites who are Vampirizing The Earth.  

That is a problem because the actual issue with real life Climate Change is the opposite, the Fossil Fuels themselves are just Ancient Prehistoric Garbage in and of itself removing them from the earth isn’t a problem.  The problem is how the Atmosphere is poisoned by the byproduct of burning those fuels.  The primary issue is what we’re putting in, not what we're taking out.

Now I don’t think a good Allegory needs to be a perfect 1 to 1 allegory, my opinion on allegory in general is similar to Tolkien’s.  For example in a JRPG type setting having the energy source also be a source of Magic makes perfect sense.

So you may wonder what the problem even is?  The problem is getting the nature of how we are harming the planet reversed makes it a lot harder to propose any useful solutions, since both scenarios also have it so we need to do more than just stop, we also need to fix the damage already done somehow.

The truth is something like The Lifestream to me would make a better allegory for the renewable energies we want to encourage. On a Metaphysical level I have trouble believing something like that could ever be depleted.

It’s not a coincidence that this mistake is made so many times however.  It’s a product of the desire to tie environmentalism to mysticism, making The Earth itself a Deity we are taking from and not giving back to.  But also way back in the day the issue of CO2 emissions caused by Fossil Fuels wasn’t even the original main concern of the Environmentalist movement, it first grew out of Conservationism, concerns about things like Deforestation.  The thing is as bad as Deforestation can be, it's not the irreversible damage that CO2 emissions are becoming, it does make that problem worse, but it isn't the main source.  [Update:  I do believe Reforestation is a vital part of combating Climate Change which is why it really annoys me when Anti-Zionists try to paint Israel Reforestation of land Deforested by the Roman, Muslim and Ottoman Empire.]

The Irony about how these tropes pop up even in Japanese media is that I feel it would actually fit Japanese Mysticism more.to make it a matter of poisoning the Life Force of The Planet rather than Vampirising it.  Shinto mysticism includes a concept called Kagere, direct references to which in Anime often get translated as "Sullied".  The concept of a spiritual pollution tied to immoral or even merely taboo acts or sometimes just negative emotions.  Plenty of Anime and Video Games have concepts that definitely feel to me like a fantastical adaptation of that concept given a new name, Miasma gets used a lot, the recent Zelda Games have Malice/Gloom, Tales of Zestiria has Maleficence, Fate/Stay Night has it's Grail Mud.  Now I consider this concept an unhealthy and toxic way to look at morality, but as a Fantastical allegory for CO2 emissions I think it would be much better.  Make it the source of your Dark Magic and the Planet’s Life Force the source of the regular Magic.

Another thing both FFVII and Franxx have in common is that in the backstory actual Fossil Fuels had been the dominant form of energy production before the villains of the story succeeded in imposing their system on the world.   And that is where the concerns I’m talking about here are parallel to the main point of my blog post titled Dystopian Science Fiction only Reinforces the Real World Status Quo.  Making your allegory for fossil fuels something that replaced what it's an allegory for makes it so many won’t see it as an allegory for that at all.  Fears that what we might replace Fossil Fuels with could turn out to be worse have long been a vital tactic of how Fossil Fuel Energy companies suppress alternatives, Nuclear Energy never took off in the United States because shows like The Simpsons present it as cartoonishly toxic and dangerous.

I imagine critics of the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII who come at it from a Leftist perspective see all the stuff about rebuilding the Fossil Fuel Industry in stories set after the original game as Recuperation, but that an Oil Industry being suppressed by ShinRa helped cause the crisis was part of the Lore already in the original game, that wasn’t something added later.

Both these stories I actually like overall, I defended the later part of Franxx in 2018 when doing so was not very popular, and FFVII’s lore intrigues me for how it can intentionally or not be read as Stoic and how I think it’s thematically more like Tolkien then any Medieval setting JRPG.  This is just one critique I felt had to be made.

Dark Elves in Anime are nothing like The Drow

I find it interesting how whenever the Moriquendi come up in something I'm reading or watching about Arda Lore the author needs to stop and explain how “Dark Elves” in Tolkien have nothing to do with the almost Demonic qualities Dark Elves have in modern Fantasy.  Because it’s really mainly DnD Dark Elves they have in mind, perhaps also the second Thor movie.

I watch a lot of Anime, and while on the one hand the influence of Tolkien is way less direct on Fantasy Anime that feature Elves and Dwarves and Goblins then he is in The West, so is DnD, in Japan other Tabletop Role Playing Games were always more popular than DnD.  And I can’t help but wonder if almost by sheer coincidence the Dark Elves you see in Anime are not too dissimilar to the Avari?

These Anime definitely still use the term differently.  Moriquendi in Tolkien’s writings refers neither to a moral assessment or anything about how they looked, it simply meant neither they or their ancestors ever saw the Light of the Trees.  I think most casual film only Tolkien fans would be most shocked to learn that Legolas and the other Mirkwood Elves are Moriquendi not Calaquendi.  So I feel like mentioning here that the standard Elves you see in Anime and JRPGs even if they are called “Light Elves” or their home is called Alfheim are if I compared them to any of Tolkien’s Elves really Wood Elves, perhaps even more specifically the Sylvan Elves before the Sindar royal families took them over.  The thing that might most disappoint a Tolkien fan watching Fantasy Anime is that there are no High Elves, no one who seems at all like the Vanyar, Noldor or even the Teleri of Beleriand.  The Anime or JRPG races that do give off Calaquendi vibes to me are not actually called Elves at all but rather are the Cetra of Final Fantasy VII and the Iorph of Maquia.

Tolkien devotes surprisingly little time to describing what any of his Elves looked like, especially in terms of Skin, Eye or Hair color.  The Sylvan Elves are often assumed to all be Golden haired because only one of them ever had their hair color described at all.  It is possible those Avari tribes who stayed in the East or South even into the Third Age may have developed darker skin tones just like the humans living in those parts of the world, but either way that’s not why they’re called Dark Elves.

There is a lot of talk about how Dragon Quest is the key Ur Text of a lot of aspects of modern “Generic” Fantasy Anime (like how Orcs in Isekai are usually Humanoid Pig creatures rather than another word for Goblin as it is in Tolkien).  However it seems the Anime Dark Elf trend is an exception to this, I have never played any Dragon Quest game but from skimming the Wiki they seem to have no Dark Elves.

So the archetypal basis for the Anime Dark Elves I’m talking about seems to come from Record of Lodoss War, principally the character of Pirotess who’s also important in the spin off Legend of Crystania.  Likewise the Blond Haired Green Clad Archer Elf Maidens of modern Anime largely descend from Deedlit.  Record of Lodoss began literally as a Tabletop Roleplaying Game campaign, but again whenever someone talking about it says it simply was DnD they are assuming, it seems they mostly made up their own rules that drew more on Tunnels & Trolls and RuneQuest.  And I’d say the greatest evidence of that is how Pirotess is nothing like the Drow of DnD.  Modern Anime Dark Elves clearly based on her in part include Aura Shurifon in War On Geminar and Yao Ha Ducy in Gate.

The look of these Dark Elves tends to be Silver Hair and a fairly Dark Skin tone but not like you see in Africa.  The Japanese have a fairly decent variety of Skin Complexions among themselves, there are a number of darker skinned Anime characters in shows set in Japan who the western audience tends to at first assume must be some type of Gaijin but usually no it really just represents coming from certain regions of Japan.  And I think that may be largely what they are going for with these Dark Elves, because they are at the end of the day not all that fundamentally different from the Vanilla Elves.

If you brought back the old Norse terminology you could have both types of Dark Elves in the same story, with Drow style Elves as the Svartalfar and these RoLW style Anime Dark Elves as the Dokkalfar.

JRPGs as a concept are an American Misconception.

Years ago I watched an Extra Credits video on YouTube about JRPGs and Western RPGS and I always considered it a fairly bad video but now that I know so much more about the history of RPGs I realize their first mistake was conceding the very idea of JRPGs as being a thing in the first place.

I'm not arguing there are no differences between RPGs in the West and RPGs made in Japan caused by distinct cultural differences.  But they are the same as how every genre and medium of story telling seems different in Japan.  The only other one where the Japanese version is virtually treated as a completely different thing is Animation aka Anime.  In that case though it is increasingly well understood now that what we think of when we hear the word "Anime" is principally certain kinds of Anime that even in Japan are actually a niche interest.

When you look at the history of Japanese RPG Video Games that either never got localized, or even if they were were never as popular over here as they were in Japan, or if they did get popular over here were popular in a way that kind of compartmentalized them from other RPGs in how pop culture thinks about them.  You'll realize that what American Gamers first think of when we think of JRPGs is really much more specifically Squarsoft Games of the SNES and PS1 (and not even all of them really), Final Fantasy, Chrono Trigger, the SaGa series, Super Mario RPG ect.  Just look at that old College Humor Video parodying JRPGs, every specific game it will make you think of is Square, it's story is mostly a Parody of FF7's plot with visuals taken from Final Fantasy Tactics and Mario RPG.

The main example for that third situation is Pokémon.  I saw a Twitter argument sometime last year where some people were getting annoyed at other people not counting Pokémon as a JRPG.  And yeah Pokémon officially is one, but it's just as different from our standard perception of a JRPG as any Western RPG is.  When you compare the first Gen Pokémon games to prior Game Boy RPGs mechanically and visually it kind of is a natural development, but Game Boy RPGs were never the foundation of how JRPGs were defined, even series that started there gained their true notoriety when promoted to home consoles.

Recently I was watching YouTube videos about NES and SNES Video Games that were officially licensed Dungeons & Dragons games.  And in one the person making the video talked about not liking pseudo 3D first person Dungeon Crawlers but referred to that as being specifically a characteristic of Western RPGs in contrast to "what they do in Japan", but I'm well aware that there are plenty of Japanese RPGs that also do that.  I also dislike that kind of dungeon gameplay, but since I have such a unique history with how I learned about RPGs I never thought of it as something you'd go to Japan to get away from because my first experience with being annoyed by it was Phantasy Star for the Sega Master System, and then learning the Megami Tensei games also did that is why I never tried to play any of them.

In Japan DragonQuest is the most popular RPG franchise, it doesn't just edge out Final Fantasy it dwarfs Final Fantasy.  And there is one Trope we Americans associate with JRPGs that DragonQuest has pretty much been the exact opposite on.  The Killing God or God being Evil trope is mostly a Square and Atlus thing, in DragonQuest God is usually The Goddess and pretty benevolent.  And that is a more accurate reflection of general Japanese Spirituality where Amaterasu is arguably the centerpiece of the Shinto Pantheon.  However back in the 2000s when edgy Atheism was still the trendy thing in Online Culture the Megami Tensei and FF Tactics approach was what American internet Nerds latched onto.  The subject of Goddess Worship in Japanese Media is something I may have to go deeper into someday.

DragonQuest so thoroughly dwarfs everything else in Japan that every Manga or Light Novel or Anime set in a "generic RPG setting" is very clearly using specifically DragonQuest III as the model.  And secretly I think that's the key to why so many American Weebs be hating on these shows.  The reasons they say they don't like them I think are a little disingenuous, the truth is these American Gamers would much rather be Isekaied to a discount Final Fantasy.  Hell I personally would love an Anime set in a world modeled after SaGa Frontier.

But as is the Anime I would recommend to Final Fantasy fans are more Anime that were an influence on Final Fantasy rather then the other way around.  These include Ghibli films like Nausica of The Valley of The Wind and Castle in The Sky.  And I feel like I'm the only person who notices that Sephiroth's character design was clearly inspired by Kunzite from Sailor Moon.

But going back to that Extra Credits video, their main thesis was that JRPGs are not really the same genre but some coincidental independent development.  And that ignores how Western RPGs were and still are played in Japan, specifically the Ultima Series was a very well documented influence on early DragonQuest and early Final Fantasy as was Wizardry.  The RPG is a Western concept in origin including the Role Playing Video Game specifically, that Japanese Gaming Culture made several different distinctly Japanese variations on, but only one of those was ever popular enough in America during the formative years of Gamer Culture to really define how American Gamers stereotype Japanese RPGs.

Update: On Mastadon this interesting conversation was brought to my attention.

https://beehaw.org/post/664403

On Second Thought The Eminence in Shadow might qualify as a more Final Fantasy Esque Isekai.  It's resemblance to "Magic Academy" Anime breeds a similarity to Final Fantasy VIII, and then there's the very concept of a prominent background character named Cid.

Magic Academy Light Novels/Anime owe nothing to Harry Potter.

I know that sounds absurd at first, but it really isn't.  

Otaku Media is a niche subculture in Japan, and their relationship with taking influence from the west is complicated. In the formative years of the subculture in the 70s and 80s a lot clearly was taken and that's why Star Wars and Superman references never feel out of place in Anime.  But by the late 90s the culture started becoming increasingly insular, the thing Miyazaki said that got mistranslated and misquoted as "Anime was a Mistake" was all about how annoyed he is at modern Anime refusing to be influenced by stuff other then prior Anime.

Harry Potter did not invent the concept of fantastical magic themed Schools or using one as the setting for a Fantasy story.  Western Fantasy Novels with such a concept can be traced back to the 50s.  The late 90s saw an increase in such concepts because using even normal school as a setting only became it's own genre in the prior decade.

But since some of these Magic Academy Anime are technically not Magic at all but nominally some sort of SciFi ability, I could add the X-Men comics to the list of things that were kinda this Genre long before Harry Potter.

The one Anime that I do view as maybe explicitly Harry Potter influenced I like is, Little Witch Academia, but maybe not even LWA since two of the Pre-Potter magic School franchises from that video were about specially All Female Witch Schools.  Still LWA is distinct from the Light Novel trend I'm principally talking about.

My agenda here is NOT about trying to destroy the legacy of Harry Potter because of the now exposed bigotry of She-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named.  I'm not even a fan of this genre of Anime, I've yet to get through a full cour of a single show where this is it's main genre.  However I will recommend while on that subject Chivalry of a Failed Knight since it has an explicit Trans character. 

Rather the agenda of mine this post does fit into is my desire to draw attention to how much modern Anime has it's roots in a lot of obscure forgotten 90s Media that was popular within this subculture in Japan but didn't get localized for the West or directly adapted into Anime till 10-20 years later if at all.  Like YU-NO: A Girl Who Chants Love at The Bound of This World.  

And while I still am far from an expert on that subject I've already found one such piece of hidden Otaku Media that is in fact a Magic School setting before Harry Potter.  Lunar: Sanposuru Gakuen (Lunar: Walking School) released in Japan in January of 1996, almost a year and a half before the first Harry Potter book was published.  This instalment didn't get a Western Release but it was part of an already popular series.

Even before that there was a Shoujo Manga/Anime series called Akazukin Chaka.

However these kinds of hidden pieces of the puzzle of Anime History are not of interest to Mother's Basement when he makes multiple videos on this genre calling them "Anime Harry Potter knockoffs" for clicks.  He's even aware of the differences like the Academy and Magic's existence not being an in-universe secret, and the lack of anything like the house sorting system.

However there is another piece of this puzzle that even these more Normie observers of Anime have less of an excuse to have missed.  Final Fantasy VIII released in February of 1999 but was in production already before Final Fantasy VII was even fully released yet and thus also before Harry Potter.  And just look at it's early Cut Scenes.  It's a Fantastical Academy and the unforms are clearly way more similar to what we've come to expect from LN based Magic Academy Anime then the more generic Harry Potter robes.  

Meanwhile the Japanese Translation of the first Harry Potter book wasn't published till December of 1999, Final Fantasy VIII was almost a full year earlier.

Update July 30th:  Low and behold like right after I made this Reign of The Seven Spellblades starts airing, a show seemingly calculated to make this post age poorly.  But it really only proves my point more, that's what Anime actively trying to evoke Harry Potter looks like, it exposes how not like HP at all the swarm of shows preceding it truly are, all while still managing to be better then Harry Potter in the way only an Anime version of it's premise could be.

Princesses can outrank Queens

 So there's a YouTube Vidoe that fully breaks down the History of the title "Prince of Wales".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_AP3Z6KvkM&pp=ygUeaGlzdG9yeSBvZiB0aGUgUHJpbmNlIG9mIFdhbGVz

And one thing I realized is this is largely the origin of the use of the English Word Prince as we know it entirely.  And one major point is when certain Welsh rulers started using the Title it was due to it's connection to the Ancient Roman Imperial title of Princeps viewed as outranking the title of King.

On the show The Tudors set well after all that history you'll notice that a King can also be called a Prince even while they are a Ruling King.  Machiavelli's book titled The Prince was always intended to be about a status equal to that of a King not inherently lesser.

Princess is the feminine form of Prince, even though we all know that we fail to think of it the same since Reissuance Germany and Italy never had any ruling Princesses, all the states called Principalities always had male rulers. 

Yet at the end of Shakespeare's Anthony and Cleopatra the Queen Cleopatra is called a Princess by her handmaiden.  This was based on a quote taken from Plutarch's biography of Marc Anthony.

When translating The Hebrew Bible into English multiple words get translated "Prince", most notably Sar, Nagyim and Nasi, but the only uses of "Princess" in the KJV are the feminine form of Sar, Sarah.  However the use of "King" in these translations is more consistent always being a form of Melek.  Yet I remember being told once that at least Assyrian Sources definitely thought of Sar as being a higher ranked title then Melek.  In fact the oldest version of "King of Kings" seems to Sar Sarrani, the Melek version came later.  And none of these Prince words are ever used in The Bible with the meaning of "Son of a King".

And yet because Princess in modern dictionaries gets defined as meaning only a Daughter of a King/Queen or Wife of a Prince, lots of Internet Nerds get all pedantic about certain Nintendo characters being called Princess when they are also clearly presented as being the ruling Monarch.  Princess Peach/Toadstool, Princess Zelda in some eras of the "Timeline", Princess Daisy.  And I think we even see it beyond Nintendo in some other Video Game Franchises like Final Fantasy.

A lot of this could be read as just making fun of Nintendo's very make it up as they go world building.  The NES Games never thought about about how the world works beyond the handful of Sprites we actually see, and then later games with more needed worldbuilding didn't want to make the female leads of these franchises subordinate to someone else.  But I also think it's a little influenced by Star Wars where Leia was still called a Princess after her Parents were dead.

But occasionally someone says this with a more serious criticism in mind, that it demeans or infantilizes these characters who are actually Queens to call them the same title we do Disney Princesses.  But I say just remember how the English word Prince originated.  I would rather not see Zelda or Peach or Daisy ever demoted to being a mere Queen.

Stoicism vs Gnosticism in Star Wars

Every time I see someone complain about how the Midichlorians “Demystify” The Force, all I can think about is how limited the modern West’s conception of Mysticism has become thanks to the influence of Pythagorean Dualism and Platonist Idealism.

These same people will mention how The Force as a concept drew on ideas from Eastern Mysticism, the Yin-Yang of Taoism and hints of Shintoism Lucas may have picked up on in all those Japanese Samurai films he watched, for example how he defines The Dark Side as being an infection or virus fits Kegare better then it does Taoism.  But they failed to do their homework on all of that, if they did they’d know this idea that factoring anything biological into explaining how The Force works somehow makes it less Spiritual couldn’t be any more alien to Taoist or Shinto ways of thinking, to them Biology is Spiritual and Spirituality is Biological.

I myself have often been one of those who keeps saying Star Wars is Fantasy not Sci-Fi.  But I’ve come to realize that the Anti-Midichlorians mentality that has always annoyed me is a product of the exact same limited western mindset that lies behind making a hard distinction between Sci-Fi and Fantasy.  Now it is still useful to point out how core aspects of Star Wars’ narrative and thematic intentions are more similar to LOTR than Star Trek.  However sometimes even Star Trek Metaphysics are rather Spiritual and even Tolkien can be more scientific than you might expect.

So ScreenRant has an article called 15 quotes about The Force that when quoting Obi-Wan's main Force exposition in A New Hope and Yoda’s in Empire actually has the gall to claim The Midichlorian reveal “retconned” them, but fortunately it quotes them directly allowing me to refresh my memory.  Both quotes talk about The Force being generated by Living Things, not only is that compatible with the Midichlorian reveal but it pretty much proves something like that was how it worked all along.

Rick Worley has a video called What are The Whills that goes in depth into this aspect of Star Wars lore, but if you want a shorter cliff notes version on just one aspect of it watch MrSundayMovies video on Symbiants.  However I myself am a White American Christian whose understanding of Japanese spirituality comes mostly from all the Anime I watch.  So I have no desire to claim to be some great expert on Eastern Mysticism.  Instead this post shall focus on the implication in what I said at the start that the West didn’t always have this problem, at least not so nearly universally. [Update: I really regret recommending this video now that Worley has gone full Terf.]

Star Wars fans getting so offended by the Midichlorians, insisting The Force is no longer something spiritual if you’ve also made it Biological or Physical or “Carnal”, wreaks of Gnosticism to me.  It reminds me of when I watched this YouTube video from a Full Preterist responding to the accusation that their de Physicalizing of The Resurrection makes them Gnostic, he said he’s not Gnostic because he doesn’t believe the Physical world is fundamentally totally evil, thing is not all ancient Gnostics necessarily exactly believed that either, this video went on to talk about his distinguishing between the Spiritual and the Carnal.  And then in the comments section I saw someone express how they found it so disturbing that Futurists (and by implication also Partial Preterists) want the Resurrection to be Carnal, they saw it as a rejection of Spirituality that so many Christians have an attachment their fleshy carnal bodies, they think Christians should want to "Let Go" of them.

Now Star Wars has been accused of being Gnostic.  Ryan Reeves in one of his videos (I don’t remember which one) references a quote from Yoda in Empire Strikes Back where he says “Luminous being we are, not this crude matter” and yeah that sounds pretty Gnostic out of context, like how some quotes from Paul and the Fourth Gospel are taken out of context to make them sound Gnostic.  But even the immediate context of Yoda’s fuller quote undermines that Gnostic interpretation, much less how utterly Anti-Gnostic the Midichlroian reveal is.  Perhaps this quote wouldn’t have been so easy to misconstrue if only a “just” had been added, I do consider the OT not as precisely and carefully well written as the PT.

In April I made a post about Gnosticism in Anime where I also brought up Stoicism in the context of Final Fantasy VII.  I talk about this stuff more on my main Theology Blog, in posts about the Pagan Greek Origins of Puritan Sexuality and Stoicism in Early Christianity.  It is my view that Gnosticism is Pythagoreanism and Platonism taken to their logical extreme, and that New Testament Theology, if you want to compare it to any pre-existing School of Greek Philosophy, was closest to Stoicism.  Many are surprised to learn this, but during the first century proper Platonism was a minority position, Plato’s influence was felt in all schools to an extent, but among Greek Philosophers who believed in mysticism at all, Stoicism was the dominant perspective.  Though it was a form of Stoicism in some ways detached from the founding principles of Zeno.

But one of the core differences between Christianity and Stoicism is that Stoicism has no Resurrection, instead the Stoic view of the afterlife was the individual Soul eventually fading back into the World Soul, as well as a belief in endless cycles of destruction and rebirth. This is basically the After Life view of Star Wars as expressed by Yoda to Anakin in Episode III and further delved into in those season 6 Clone Wars episodes, the Personal Force equating to the Individual Soul and the Cosmic Force equating to the World Soul.

It is the cyclical aspect that is key to what makes Stoicism similar to Eastern Mysticism.  When I was watching the Netflix Anime film Bubble on April 28th with this post both above and below this paragraph mostly already written, I was reminded of all of it.  It uses the modern Big Bang Theory based scientific understanding of the Universe to evangelize this cyclical mysticism

In Stoicism the word Pneuma (which is the Greek word translated Spirit) was NOT a word for something intangible like Plato’s world of forms, Pneuma is Hyper Corporeal rather than non Corporeal.  And their sense of the word is what was dominant in the first century.  And when you really dig into it, I feel it can very much be compared to both the Lifestream in Final Fantasy VII and The Force in Star Wars.

There is a YouTube channel whose avatar is a low quality picture of Rika Furude from Higurashi and whose username is simply a Period.  This mysterious YouTube channel has a video called The Foundations of Star Wars, this video digs into the moral philosophy of Star Wars and what the channel finds horribly wrong with it.  This Moral Philosophy is basically the same as that later Roman Stoicism I spoke of, Stoicism after allowing itself to draw too much influence from Plato especially The Laws.  And I think the fact that neither this YouTuber or George Lucas himself can find a way to make the existence of the Force compatible with a more pro pleasure pro attachment morality is tied to just how lost and forgotten the original Stoic Morality has become.  Zeno was a Free Love Hippie who even defended Incest, he did not intend to create a Philosophy that would become synonymous with being an unemotional Vulcan.  Likewise Diogenes and the original Cynics would hate the connotations that word now has.

Zeldom has a series of videos on The Legend of Zelda’s Force which are interesting.  But perhaps the Sci-Fi/Fantasy media that truly is Zeno’s Stoicism in contrast to Star Wars’ Roman Stoicism would be the Magical Girl genre of Anime.

Gnosticism in Anime and Video Games

TVTropes has a page called UsefulNotes/Gnosticism where it talks about Gnosticism and then lists examples of fictional stories that were or are thought to be influenced by Gnosticism.

As an Amateur Christian Theologian, I think it's a problem how often Gnosticism is defined based on it's mythological archetypes rather then the actual Philosophical/Metaphysical point.  If your view of the After Life is an intangible spirit realm where we are free of the confines of the Carnal Material World, you're a Gnostic no matter how Orthodox, Nicene and Trinitarian your Theology and Christology is.

One question that is particularly relevant to the accuracy of calling some of these fictional cosmologies Gnostic is, can you be Gnostic but not even nominally Christian?  According to Religion for Breakfast no one called themselves Gnostics in antiquity, and all the known specific groups we call Gnostics were Christian sects who identified each of these Gnostic Mythological archetypes with at least one person or concept in The Bible or some other Judeo-Christian source.  

However they are also the result of these Christians being influenced by older gentile ideas that in my opinion Christians shouldn't have allowed to influence them, Neopythagoreanism, Middle Platonism, Hermeticism, Hellenistic Mystery Religions and since they mostly started in Alexandria aspects of native Egyptian Mythology and Mysticism (thing is the "Proto-Orthodox" were also being influenced by at least the first two of those during this time period, simply to different degrees or in different ways.  The difference between whether you were called a Heretic or not was chiefly rejecting a Bodily Resurrection).  So you take the mythological archetypes that comes from those influences but subtract the explicitly Christian stuff, and you get a framework that can be compared to a number of fictional Fantasy/Sci-Fi cosmologies.

But going back to my distinction between Gnostic Mythology and the actual point of Gnosticism.  I don't think any currently existing "developed" culture is less inclined to sympathize with the point of Gnosticism then Japan.  Shinto Mysticism I actually view as fairly compatible with Stoic Metaphysics, and Stoicism was I'd say antithetical to all of the Non-Christian antecedents of Gnosticism, even if by the second century they were using a lot of the exact same Greek key words and phrases.

And so when I look at a lot of the Anime or other Otaku Media that has been or can be argued to resemble Gnostic mythology, I kind of feel like they're using the Gnostic Mythological framework to convey the exact opposite attitude.  

This is most explicit in SSSS.Gridman where the Sophia figure is trapped in an Idealized Platonic World of Forms and the Carnal Physical Real World is what she needs to return to.  But I think on some level the same is true of the use of Gnostic or Gnostic adjacent ideas in classics like Serial Experiments Lain or Revolutionary Girl Utena.  

I would not apply a Gnostic reading of any kind to most Isekai however, in modern Isekai the other world is just as much of a carnal/material world as ours, it's the culture being different that makes it often a world the Otaku/Neet protagonist feels more at home in then Modern Japan.  Sword Art Online does sometimes feel like it's making Gnostic Mythological references, but that isn't proper Isekai.

But in the case of Final Fantasy VII (and perhaps then every FF that's been argued to be Gnostic) I go back to what I said before about the Stoics and Gnostics being antithetical even in their use of a lot of the same terms.  I think every argument for Final Fantasy VII having a Gnostic cosmology is actually better explained by a Stoic reading, The Lifestream is the Pneumatic World Soul and Mako (like Mana in other JRPGs and Manga/Anime inspired by them) is a Pneumatic Substance.  The Physical world being Evil and Dirty couldn't be more the opposite of what a story like Final Fantasy VII is trying to say about Nature.  These are stories where the Spiritual and Carnal are in a symbiotic relationship with each other, it is Man's Sins (especially Capitalism) that create the problems.

The western world however has been very influenced by Gnosticism, for all the talk about the Gnostics as some minority the Roman Church persecuted into extinction, I'd argue they kind of indirectly won, all of Mainstream Christianity has become at least mildly Gnostic.  Gnosticism is essentially Platonism taken to it's logical extreme, and so that's why a lot of the Japanese media I just talked about and others get interpreted by westerners more Gnostically then I feel the Japanese could have possibly intended.

Update September 26th: It's occurred to me that I should explain the Final Fantasy VII part a bit more.

The Gnostic Reading of Final Fantasy VII in large part revolves around equating the Lifestream with the Gnostic Pleroma.  The Lifestream and Pleroma have in common being both the source and destiny of each individual Soul  However the Gnostic Pleroma is distinctly outside the physical world, the physical world is basically a prison to the pieces of it stuck here.  The Lifesream however is the World, it and the physical Earth are intimately connected, they form a Symbiant Circle what happens to one will effect the other.  It is quite literally the Soul and Spirit of The Earth.

The World Soul is a concept in a few schools of Greek Philosophy, but it is the Stoic Version that has all the same similarities to the Lifestream the Pleroma has but also is part of the world rather then separate.

Basically Gnosticism has more in common with Scientology then it does the Lore of FFVII.

Further Update October 14 2022: I just obtained Platonist Philosophy 80 BC to AD 250 by George Boys-Stones and chapter 8 talks about the World Soul and Nature.

Much of the thesis of the chapter is that while Middle Platonists and Stoics agreed on the World having a Soul, for the Stoics it was a pretty natural product of their Metaphysics as it's virtually synonymous with their God, while for the Platonists it kind of didn't fit so well and proved awkward.

So to Middle Platonists the World Soul was a lesser god at best, and to Plutarch it was actually Evil, but in-between it was also presented as a sort of force without much will or agency of it's own.  

But reading this has only strengthened my Stoic interpretation of The Lifestream and Final Fantasy VII.

I also view the Original Pre-Romanization Stoics as having been the Communists of the Hellenistic World.  And so here's a good Marxist Analysis of Final Fantasy VII.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9EWCLHkqRQNkPHiCAYcIUrJ3twpAmD2o

Fantasy stories are better with a focused narrative.

Last year I did a post about one aesthetic problem I have with most Live Action Fantasy TV shows of the last Decade or so.  But there is also a narrative problem.

Game of Thrones had a structure that involved jumping around between various characters and plotlines that were not directly connected in any way yet apparent.  And for Game of Thrones it worked, in fact that show's downfall seemed to begin when it started rushing to tie everything together.  But the problem with so much post GoT Fantasy TV shows is emulating that aspect of GoT's structure.

I prefer my Fantasy Stories to be adventure stories, about one protagonist or group of protagonists on a journey, with the audience learning about the epic scale and lore of the world as they encounter it through those protagonists eyes.  This is why The Hobbit, The Fellowship of The Ring, the Narnia Books, the first Dragonlance book, and most Fantasy Anime (Isekai or not) I'm a fan of work so well.  And outside the realm of specifically medieval European style Fantasy I can add The Phantom Menace and A New Hope, even Star Trek when it intentionally or not starts to seem more Fantasy then SciFi, I think both Avatar The Last Airbender and Legend of Korra originally worked that way as well but I didn't watch them.  It's also essentially how Fantasy Video Games like JRPGs wind up being structured.

Now some of the sagas I just referred to will eventually split up the main cast or even jump away from them altogether.  But that's after doing a lot of build up, Peter Jackson's version gave us 3 to four hours before the Fellowship was broken, but the content of the book could have given us a full TV season with more episodes then a GoT season.  Also cutting away to villains occasionally is a different matter.

I'm well aware that the Wheel of Time books are older then the books Game of Thrones was based on, and so fans of that franchise will be annoyed at me referring to it's new Amazon Prime TV show as the product of a post GoT trend, but it was largely my thoughts on how that show played out that made me start working on this post.

However I suspect the TV show is only doing what I don't like here because of the decision to cram 4 novels into one 8 episode season.  The series splits it's initial party up at the end of episode 2, and it goes on to treat that split and their eventual reunion with a gravitas I do not feel was properly earned.  How it feels in TV form would be like if the Fellowship of the Ring split up before they even reached Rivendell.

I've referred to the film Maquia as being the fantasy Anime that most resembles the Aesthetic I would want for an Animated film or series set in the First Age of Middle Earth.  But I've also now watched 11 episodes of Record of Grancrest War, and I think in a weird way that Anime most resembles the Inklings ideologically.  It's also another example of an Anime that handles this issue better then any of these American TV shows, it only spends any significant time away from it's main couple after spending a lot of time establishing them.

Isekai Light Novel Adaptations naturally focus primarily on the POV of the Isekaied protagonist(s).

Update November 2022:  I have very mixed feelings on The Rings of Power series, most of what I don't like does come down to it forcing the GoT story structure on Tolkien. 

Science Fiction is a Sub Genre of Fantasy

In the past I have been very pedantic about drawing a hard line between Fantasy and Science Fiction, especially in regards to Star Wars which I am not alone in considering Fantasy not Sci-Fi.

However my escalating indulgence in Anime over the last 5 years has increased my appreciation for how blurry the line can be.  But more importantly looking at the history of the Genre has made me realize that ALL Science Fiction is Fantasy but not all Fantasy is Science Fiction.

People Fantasize about many things, our more traditional definition of what a Fantasy story or world is comes from Fantasies about the Past.  Urban Fantasy is our fantasies about those elements of the mythic past surviving into the modern world just out of sight.  Fantasy's overlap with Horror is tied to our fantasies about what scares us.

But we also fantasize about the Future, and outer space, or alternate routes history could have taken.  We fantasize about what technology could achieve in the future as it continues to advance, or perhaps has secretly achieved already but is being kept secret by the government or other cabal of elites.  Or could have achieved long ago if certain mistakes were averted.  We also fantasize about finding things Scientists speculate could exist but that we haven't found yet.

When you look at the history of what's called Proto-Science Fiction, Sci-Fi tropes and ideas in works that predate the birth of Science Fiction as a distinct genre.  You'll notice that it's all Fantasy, the exact same works of the Ancient-Medieval past modern Fantasy authors look to for inspiration is exactly where the founders of Science Fiction drew their inspiration.  But when directly adapted today they are classified as just Fantasy not Sci-Fi.

From the Mahabharata & Ramayana, to a Second Century Greek novelist seeking to Parody the Odyssey, to the 1001 Arabian Knights to Japanese Folk Tales to 18th and 19th Century Gothic Romances. 

Mary Shelly's Frankenstein is sometimes called the first Sci-Fi novel.  But the thing that surprises people reading the original book after entering it with assumptions driven by a century of Cinematic Adaptations, is just how Unscientific it actually is, the full title is referencing a Greek myth after all.  The 2nd and 3rd editions actually try to make it more Scientific, the reference to Galvanism for example was not in the original 1817 edition, the only basis in the Book for the trope of the Monster having anything to do with Electricity is a Greedo Shot First/Riddles In The Dark style retcon.  Science is only discussed at all in the book because of the Rationalism of those at Ingolstadt shutting down Victor's ideas.  Victor's actual inspirations come from late Medieval and Renaissance era Alchemists, Sorcerers and Magicians, and one of the author's inspirations may have been Conrad Dipple.

In a way this makes the development of Science Fiction not unlike the development of Science itself.  Chemistry emerged out of Alchemy, Francis Bacon arguably defined the modern "Scientific Method" but he was also an occultist, a student of John Dee.  Isaac Newton believed the mystical symbolism of the design of Solomon's Temple could somehow unlock the secrets of the Universe.

Whether or not Technology can be considered a form of Magick kind of depends on how you define Magick.  One definition used by some Occultists is that it's the manipulation of the energies that exist in nature.

That's why it makes sense that the roles played by Mages in RPGs are taken over by Scientists in more Science based adventures.  White Mages become Medics and Black Mages become Mad Scientists.

Jules Verne was also pretty open about how Genre wise most of his major works were attempts to create modern Odysseys.