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truepurple: since all 'royal bloodlines' start with someone taking power with violence.
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dtgreene: Wow, man, I admit I had never thought of that before! Really, how could a royal bloodline have started? Who was the first to establish a royal bloodline, if not someone who had made himself king by force?!!
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CarChris: By doing good deeds. For example, by slaying a monster that's terrorizing the people.
I was talking about in RL
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myconv: There are very few authors who imagine a utopia future, a future with a working socioeconomic system that isn't royalty or capitalistic.
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dtgreene: In SaGa 1, you actually do reach paradise early in the game. It's a side world (and therefore optional), but there's pretty much nothing to do there. There's a healing pond, and there's what appears to be a town, but the town has no buildings and no shops. (According to one townsperson there, "Shops? Nobody works here.".

There's really very little you can do here; all you can really do is use the pool to heal (if you need it) and leave, continuing on.
That's hardly imagining paradise. How does it work and how did they get there? We will never know, seems the game did not think that deeply. At least the game is claiming it's possible, just Startrek style super light on the details if any at all.
Post edited December 13, 2023 by myconv
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myconv: just Startrek style super light on the details if any at all.
Star Trek
Robin Hood
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Breja: Sounds like a lot of woke whining.... signalling their moral rightousness by judging everything...
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myconv: This sounds like moral signaling of a right wing extremist that judges everyone.Your words have alot of built in irony. Do you think of "owning the libs with facts and logic"?
No, I believe in owning everyone with facts and logic.

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myconv: Considering the good odds of extreme right wingers like probably yourself also basing their philosophy on religion, using the word "divine" is extremely ironic.
I'm not a right winger at all, and I am an atheist. Better luck next time. Not everyone who disagrees with you is a political oponent or an extremist.

Beyond that, I can't really continue this discussion with you, since political discussion of this sort is not allowed on this forum and I don't want to get banned. All I can say is that you seem desperately in need of better education. Read, read, and then read some more, and then perhaps you'll develop some understanding of things like long term cultural context of modern works of fiction.
Post edited December 13, 2023 by Breja
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dtgreene: In SaGa 1, you actually do reach paradise early in the game. It's a side world (and therefore optional), but there's pretty much nothing to do there. There's a healing pond, and there's what appears to be a town, but the town has no buildings and no shops. (According to one townsperson there, "Shops? Nobody works here.".

There's really very little you can do here; all you can really do is use the pool to heal (if you need it) and leave, continuing on.
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myconv: That's hardly imagining paradise. How does it work and how did they get there? We will never know, seems the game did not think that deeply. At least the game is claiming it's possible, just Startrek style super light on the details if any at all.
Well, the intro of SaGa 1 talks about the tower, and how there's supposedly paradise at the top of the tower. Yet, somehow, you reach paradise on 3F, even though I believe the tower has 24 floors.

The paradise on 3F is one of the game's minor worlds. These worlds are definitely not developed much. Here are some of the others (spoilers ahead, plus one of them might need a content warning):
* There's a world of water that you can walk around in. At the north end, there's statues. Checking them will give you X-Potions, but after the 3rd, checking again gives you an encounter.
* There's a minor world of clouds with air currents and treasure. This world can be a pain to navigate, but there are some items here (though nothing you can't buy).
* 13F has a dry world with octopi who are complaining about the lack of water. On 14F, there's a flooded world with people in it, who are accusing someone of throwing garbage down the whole. If you step on the whirlpool square, you take the garbage out of the whole, then fall down to the 13F world, only it's filled with water and raining (good for those octopi). Go back up to 14F, and now this world is dry, and a small castle with a bit of treasure is now accessible.
* There's a world where the people are wealthy, but busy. Not that special, but it's important because of the context of the following world.
* [CW: death (and war?)] The following floor, there's a similar looking world, except that this is in ruins. There are 3 dead children (you check the body, and the game says "this child looks dead."). Go further and there's a dead body. Check it, and there's a note, with the game over music playing. From the note, "Creator, protect the children.". Oh, and the game secretly puts a Nuclear Bomb into your inventory at this point.
* There's the garden world where you get Excalibur.
* There's a library world. In the Japanese version, each book has the name of an adventurer and how far they got up the tower. The last one is your name, but it doesn't tell you how far you got. In the US version, they instead give you a message like "Ashura was created by ...". Oh, and one of the bookshelves is fake, taking you into a hidden room with a Flare Tome.

So, I would say that the game does tackle some surprisingly deep topics or its age, especially with that one world that I put a content warning on.

By the way, in the Japanese version, that Creator was God.

(Also, note that I only covered the optional minor worlds. There's 4 major worlds, where the bulk of the game takes place; it is these worlds that have big overworlds with towns and dungeons in them.)
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Breja: No, I believe in owning everyone with facts and logic.

I'm not a right winger at all, and I am an atheist. Better luck next time. Not everyone who disagrees with you is a political oponent or an extremist.
Then you shouldn't argue right wing emotional sound bites like-

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Breja: "Breja: Sounds like a lot of woke whining.... signalling their moral rightousness by judging everything"
Post edited December 13, 2023 by myconv
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myconv: This sounds like moral signaling of a right wing extremist that judges everyone.Your words have alot of built in irony. Do you think of "owning the libs with facts and logic"?
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Breja: No, I believe in owning everyone with facts and logic.

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myconv: Considering the good odds of extreme right wingers like probably yourself also basing their philosophy on religion, using the word "divine" is extremely ironic.
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Breja: I'm not a right winger at all, and I am an atheist. Better luck next time. Not everyone who disagrees with you is a political oponent or an extremist.

Beyond that, I can't really continue this discussion with you, since political discussion of this sort is not allowed on this forum and I don't want to get banned. All I can say is that you seem desperately in need of better education. Read, read, and then read some more, and then perhaps you'll develop some understanding of things like long term cultural context of modern works of fiction.
You want to be treated as an "humanist" wielding such prejudices that makes you to use terminology like "woke" against something which sounds to you "leftist"?

If you dislike the OP central idea you could have used different ways to show you point of view, all of them different to the use and abuse of fake right winged clichés. Probably so much cliché as the OP.
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Warloch_Ahead: Fantasy can be whatever you want it to be. Magic isn't a requirement. The idea of fantasy having to be pigeonholed into a series of familiar tropes is a failure of creativity, not a function of the genre.
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dtgreene: If the setting is realistic without magic or anything similar at all, I can't really call it "fantasy".
MIddle earth is realistic with elfs, hobbits, dwarfs, giant eagles, trolls, orcs, dragons, giant under-mountain cities, gods walking the earth, walking tress, ghosts and undeads, godlike cratures (like tom Bombadil) and so on and so forth. fantasy =/= magic.

you can even have a fantasy world with realsitic creature and no magic, for example the His Dark Materials books by Pullman. Or with just a little dose of unreal, like the Liveships books by Hobbs . Fantasy just means that - fantasy.

edit - keep in mind that genre is never clearcut and there is a lot of overlap and mixing. Dracula by Bram Stoker, for example, can be classified as Horror, Gothic FIction and Fantasy (beacuse... you know.... vampires are not real, they are made up... and other worrd for made up things is fantasy_ )
Post edited December 13, 2023 by amok
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myconv: First, most games and novels set in a high magic low tech environment
The word you are missing is "medieval". At least, for royalty. It's entirely realistic for the environment to be structured in this way. As to the heroic nature of royalty, well, the victors write the history books, and can control the available fiction as well (not necessary any more after sufficient indoctrination). It's hard to suspend disbelief when you create a society that contradicts all of history and human nature, which is probably why it only works with aliens (and even then, only if humans aren't involved). Different people have different views of "utopia" (my own has been universally defamed and crushed militarily throughout history). The best you can hope for is a mind control dystopia that happens to conform to what you like (which, given that I find solarpunk to be disgusting, is probably not what I would like). I had a longer response here, but I don't think it's productive.
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dtgreene: If the setting is realistic without magic or anything similar at all, I can't really call it "fantasy".
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amok: MIddle earth is realistic with elfs, hobbits, dwarfs, giant eagles, trolls, orcs, dragons, giant under-mountain cities, gods walking the earth, walking tress, ghosts and undeads, godlike cratures (like tom Bombadil) and so on and so forth. fantasy =/= magic
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myconv: First, most games and novels set in a high magic low tech environment
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darktjm: The word you are missing is "medieval". At least, for royalty. It's entirely realistic for the environment to be structured in this way. As to the heroic nature of royalty, well, the victors write the history books, and can control the available fiction as well (not necessary any more after sufficient indoctrination).
You are both using the word "realism" to mean "tropes we are use to". Like all sorts of fantastical elements can be in a story and no one utters the word "realism". but suggest some sort of government other than feudalism and suddenly people are talking about "realism".

This is the very toxic attitude determinant to good story telling that I spoke of. I suspect alot of it started with JRR Tokien, a curse placed on alot of future story telling, especially fantasy story telling. Tokien may not have been the first, but with the popularity and visibility kinda locked future story tellers into such a bad formula or at least a particular formula if you don't see it as 'bad', where anything significantly different and new is decried as "unrealistic" and rejected by some

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darktjm: It's hard to suspend disbelief when you create a society that contradicts all of history
Magic, trolls, elves and dwarves etc "contradict all of history"!!!

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darktjm: and human nature...
That's BS, that's the capitalist propaganda that says we can't do better than capitalism and humans by nature need to be controlled by 'elites' It's a shame for fantasy writers if they can't see past such a myopic view of 'human nature'. Aside from which "human nature" seems to somehow include beings that are specifically not human.
Post edited December 14, 2023 by myconv
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darktjm: I find solarpunk to be disgusting
I’m surprised, I thought solarpunk utopias were mostly consensual amongst science-fiction readers. What are their problems that make you dislike them so much?
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dtgreene: So, do you have any examples of representative goverments in Europe (not the Ottoman Empire, and not on other continents) from the fall of Rome to before the Renaissance? (In particular, it has to come before that one country declared independence in 1776.)
Various tribal cultures, Venice, Amalfi, various Italian city states, various Irish "Kindgoms", various Nordic "Kingdoms", post romanic celtic england, pictish culture, various "viking" cultures. Various nomadic tribes that would eventually settle eastern europe.
list goes on.

edit: feudalism did indeed become a more predominant form of governing, but partly due to it being FEUDAL. clues in the name.
Post edited December 14, 2023 by Sachys
Honestly, I think my preference, as far as low-tech fantasy is concerned, is for it to be modeled off the ancient world rather than medieval times.

There's a lot of ancient mythology that one can use as a source for all sorts of fantasy beings and magic. Like, having the gods take the form of humans, as happens in Greek mythology.
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myconv: [...]
what does a realistic orc look like?
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myconv: [...]
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amok: what does a realistic orc look like?
NVM - just gonna derail things.
Post edited December 14, 2023 by Sachys
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amok: what does a realistic orc look like?
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Sachys: NVM - just gonna derail things.
but...but... thats the fun parts... spoilsport