Putting a twist on the "Medival European Fantasy"

So I've been developing a fantasy setting and wanted to do something different than the ever so cliched AMBIGUOUSLY MEDIVAL EUROPEAN setting. It features somewhat more advanced technology (there are explicit references to printing press like machines and other machines) but I have two questions regarding this

• How do I put enough of a cultural twist on it that it doesn't sound too European
• It also features a majority of cultures having 'progressive' ideas such as no taboo on homosexuality and more flexible gender roles. How do I do this without it sounding too 'modern' ?

Find a historical culture that's been known for permissive attitude in that regard, and you've got two in one: it's not gonna be modern if they've had it so for hundreds of years, and it's not going to be Medieval European standard.

"Atheism is the religion whose followers are easiest to troll"

Like greek, they invented lesbians(), and homosexual 'acts' wasn't seen as anything odd. But there is a risk of Values Dissonance if you go to close to the truth.(Like the 'active penetrator and passive penetrated' relationship, and the latter could be a 12 year old boy...)

edited 10th Sep '13 1:22:07 PM by m8e

I was planning on adding some Values Dissonance anyway (as well as in areas other than sexuality)

I really wanted to avoid the whole "pedophila/ephephila is accepted" thing because A. Including that would make me very uncomfortable and B. A small reason why I chose to develop the society in this was was to allow some LGBT representation (because you don't see that much in mainstream fantasy) and including that alongside this would kind of have some bad Unfortunate Implications

As far as the, "Free love," thing goes, it's easiest when you reach one of two extremes—a communal group-based economy or a capitalist one.

By, "Capitalist," I mean performing a specialized labor and receiving some form of money in exchange. The reason this leads to an increase in things like homosexuality is simple—it's damn hard to choose your sexual preferences and gender identity one way or the other when you're only marrying and having children because you need a family to run a farm. Children=labor, and you typically need a 3/1 ratio of X and Y chromosomes in order to create said children. When you're making everything for yourself, you don't marry for love.

Thus, when you're able to earn capital on your own, a non-standard identity may emerge—you don't need to marry at the age of fourteen, and thus can experiment with your sexual preferences. For similar reasons, a socialist community (A small one, usually, or a collective of small ones) allows for similar freedoms.

For instance, are you familiar with the tradition of, "Two-Spirit," individuals in Native American and First Nation civilizations? (Prior to the whole, "LOL were taking ovr ur land & forcng u 2 worship our god u n00b savages," thing, I mean). They were pretty well tolerated, and I think it goes without saying that their societies weren't European based.

Fire, air, water, earth...legend has it that when these four elements are gathered, they will form the fifth element...boron.

As far as I remember, Two-Spirit wasn't just your average gay Indian, but a thing that had some sort of spiritual component along the lines of two souls in one body. Nowadays, I believe, this sort of thing would be decried as a case of "Magical Queer" or some other sort of positive discrimination. All taken together, we've got yet another multi-faceted historical example.

"Atheism is the religion whose followers are easiest to troll"

Yeah, I was planning on drawing from a variety of cultures and such to create a unique setting.

I was planning on making it a capitalist (and relatively secular) society

• I've also been trying to think of exactly how to do the government, so far I have a mostly representive system, but on a much smaller scale (a mayor of a town is elected, they work to organize the municipal utilitie, trading, etc.s of their town and trading and also go to a conference to talk with the other mayors of the region.) Other than that, they aren't exactly that powerful. Does that sound a little to close to the American representative democracy?

Are you trying to subvert the setting or avert it entirely? You could avert it by simply basing the setting off of a different location and culture entirely. You could subvert it by basing it off of a different time period (like Rennaissance or Industrial eras), have armies with guns, not using hereditary monarchies, and having the people be atheist.

More of a subversion. It's kind if an Enlightenment type thing, people have technology to approximately the degree of Clockpunk and their society is relatively secular (although many people privately practice some sort of religion)

The Native tribes that had two-spirits usually trained them as shamanic figures specifically because they were some form of LGBT (although frequently gay/lesbian or transgender). Spiritually, their sexuality/transgender nature would be a manifestation of embodying both masculine and feminine energies (not QUITE the same as "two souls in one body," at least not all the time). Like if you're a male and and you're gay, it would be taken as a sign that you can understand and handle feminine energy and rituals on a much deeper level than heterosexual men would.

With the onset of European/Christian values, Natives started looking down on LGBT people as well. For a long time they treated LGBT people EVEN WORSE, so the phrase "two-spirit" has been reclaimed by modern LGBT Natives as a positive term. Hence the inherent confusion with Magical Queer and Magical Native American.

edited 11th Sep '13 7:38:18 PM by Sharysa

Well the problem with the idea that needing a stable family that produces children = heterosexuality only is that it's not really true. This only arises when there's a social imperative to be "faithful" to your husband or wife. Without that, or even with that, you have men and women fooling around with their servants and whatnot. Without the imperative to be "faithful" such things would even be accepted. If someone was actually gay, he'd have just enough sex with his wife to get children and the rest of the time be messing around with the butler.

Greeks weren't completely capitalist or completely communal, they were in between and that's how it worked with them, and has worked in a lot of societies for a very long time. If you want it so that same-sex couples can actually get married or whatever, though, you might need that capitalist/communal society, though.

Are you using 'communal' to refer to one with a Communist economy or something else?

You should try to nail down the underlying religion(s) in the setting which tends to dictate many of the quirky aspects of the culture and conflicts within or between various factions. "Because (the) god(s) said so" tends to be enough to set up whatever sort of culture you want but then you may have to work backwards to come up with an environmental reason why those religious beliefs developed. It helps to read books like Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel", Thomas Sowell's "Conquests and Cultures" and John Keegan's "A History of Warfare". They give three distinct perspectives (evolutionary biologist, economist and military historian) dealing with environment, culture and military encounters.

Alternatively, read up on your base era (medieval Europe) and the eras in which a few key technologies were introduced and then you can speculate on how introducing those technologies in the base era would alter the culture. The printing press was available in China for centuries; it was the moveable typeface printing press that set Europe on its path to surpass China. What would happen if reliable birth control was available in a medieval setting? Let's just say that an herb was identified that, when properly prepared, cut the chance of conception by 100?

Third suggestion is to have an imperial setting where the Emperor or Emperess made a top down decree that changed everything. Make your own version of a Christian conversion or break from the church by the king, for his own reasons, and everyone else has to follow along if he is firmly in power. Maybe he is a patron of science, maybe he no longer trusts the clergy so he sets up public service exams to create a secular administration, maybe he is gay or bi and by fiat announces that it just aint that bad as the parliament/senate is poised to take over a republic from imperial rule.

Whether you think you can, or you think you can't, you are probably right.

That's really helpful actually :)

• But something else I'm wondering about is exactly how 'modern' I can make the venacular of their seting be without it creating a too 'modern' setting?

Because I want to avoid the cliched "faux-medival-England" type of speech but I don't want it to sound tooo modern.

What does it matter? For all we know, they could be speaking an entirely different language from English.

Yeah, Translation Convention is probably going to apply, but would using more 'modern' language/slang pull people out of the story? (Like certain profanity and other slang)

What matters is the difference, not the style of dialogue.

If you have of characters talking in Shakespearean English, and then someone turns up all "Yo what up mah bitches was' happnan?"; your readers will get torn out of the story.

If, on the other hand, everyone talks in modern English, it'll be fine.

I write stuff sometimes. I also sometimes make youtube videos: http://www.youtube.com/user/majormarks

That's good. I just thought that a quasi-historical setting where people spoke modern American English could be a little weird for some people. So I should just keep it consistent? And I should avoid any 'trend' type slang that could potentially 'date' the work.

Yes. For instance, Tolkien never used any weird "faux-midieval English" style in his writing. Instead, he gave his dialogue a fantastical element by having characters make references to deities and past events or historical figures particular to the setting.