Why Fantasy Worlds SHOULD Be Stuck in Medieval Times

"Don't trust the cleric guy. He works for the big magic."

Fun fact: battery-powered cars actually slightly predate gas-powered cars.

The irony is that the so called 'medieval era' was one of constant development and change in thought, culture and technology.

The modern view of "magic" is very influenced by science and technology. Back then people did not think too deeply about magical black holes or magical tesla coils. They were thinking about the magical properties of herbal medicine, scaring away bad spirits, and predicting if there would be some disaster. To say that "if you have magic you don't need science" is a backwards view of the dilemma. More accurately, it is, "if you don't have science, you don't need magic that acts as a substitute for science."

Science is not opposed to magic, and I am tired of people claiming it is. Science is a study of the natural world. If magic was a part of the natural world, it would be a part of science. If both existed in the same world. Science is not the use of electricity or medicine, it is the way you investigate the world

Sir, a second flying carpet has hit our mage towers

Terry Pratchett's Discworld series reverses this. It includes numerous books (especially those set in Ankh-Morpork) that start with some new technology/organisation being invented or resurrected (police, soccer/football, newpapers, optical telegraphy, steam trains, fractional reserve banking, governmental postal service, etc) and they stick around in later books. Over the series, the city goes from a parody of a pseudo-medieval fantasy city to the beginnings of an industrial revolution in only a few in-world decades.

You ask, "Why would you research the natural sciences when magic works" and I'd argue, it's just what people do. Sir Isaac Newton studied alchemy, people have suggested that science was a lesser importance to him than "the wisdom of the ancients" but he also discovered gravity? Why, because he wanted to understand how things work, there will always be people who want to understand how things tick. In a world with magic that's going to be the people who study magic, but those same people are going to figure out gravity, just because it's how they're minds work.

My honest opinion is that the best time era for fantasy is a Bronze Age world. The Bronze Age as we know it lasted for thousands of years for the simple reason that iron, when not treated under specific circumstances, is actually a weaker metal than bronze. That also combines with the fact that we have every reason to believe based on ruins that bronze may have been discovered and lost several times in early Neolithic farming societies as a result of catastrophic disasters breaking the trade networks necessary to allow bronze to exist. In the Americas the native population literally never left the Bronze Age until Europeans showed up, likely because the resources to make bronze are more plentiful and closer together here than in Eurasia, meaning that after the Bronze Age collapse, Europe was incentivized to eventually figure out how to make use of iron sparking invention. This in combination with the fact that meteorite iron has gone through the strengthening process simply by entering our atmosphere means that some powerful iron blades will exist which is a great analogy to adamantine, and aluminum is a lighter material that is about as strong as bronze if properly treated in a way that could be done by expert craftsmen, which is a good comparison to mithril. Combine that with how wild and untamed large parts of the world was with there still being mammoths and other human races such as Neanderthals and genuine halflings, and the fact talker many rulers fashioned themselves as divinely chosen god kings or sorcerer lords and you have a fantastic setting which realistically would remain in stasis for many thousands of years.

You are missing 1 giant point. A world that is as saturated in magic as you say would look nothing like a medieval fantasy world. Why build giant castles when a dude with a stick can just summon an earthquake and instantly tear down all that hard work? Why wear armor when some dude who just sat inside and read books all day can boil you in that metal with just a word? It's a very similar reasoning as to why castles and armor died out as cannons and guns become more effective. Even if it takes longer to train, one powerful mage is worth over a hundred knights and a thousand regular foot soldiers. The only way to counter this would be for magic to relatively rare, which then just provides incentive for technological progress.

And what? Miss out on spec ops using magic? Imagine British SAS or Delta Force casting spells and shit.

Just a few corrections, but I would say that muskets, blunderbuss and the like aren’t very early firearms, just early, it small, but if you look at the firsts firearms, they aren’t muskets, they are literally mini cannon on the end if stick, this isn’t an exaggeration, look it up, it quite literally that. Fun fact, gun didn’t get popular because they were better than bow initially, but because they needed less training (and thus, less maintenance costs) to get to a equivalent level with bows. Look at it with google, shooting a warbow would be the equivalent of lifting 80 to 110 pounds or even 185 pounds for some. England had to make a law that force everyone to own a bow and subsidize tournaments to get their archer and you can recognize them has there very skeletons were deformed because of the muscle they developed shooting bow (yes, realistic archer would be buff, even if it would be only one arm) So, unless magic is either very cheap to get or VERY powerful, to the point of justifying the expense (and even than) there is still reason that lord and the like would want to develop gun. Finally, science is like, VERY versatile when it comes to what is part of science. Since it’s the understanding of EVERYTHING, including how people act, and how to us it, it would include magic if it exists. At the end of the day, technology is how to use, create, transform and dissipate forces in way that can be useful. A fire ball spell in a barrel with the only way for the explosion to escape is pouching a ball give you a gun. Like, we study how crowd act to make architecture that is make in a way that won’t let people getting crushed and when/where it is necessary (it’s quite interesting actually) People that think that science and magic would be two separate thing underestimate just how much science incapsulate (Sorry for the monster of a comment that was)

the 2nd segment "What's the point?" kinda misses the point of why technological development occurs. humanity never had a "tech tree"; every development occurred because it benefited whomever created it. You don't invent a wheel to sometime down the road have cars, you invent it because it brings you the immediate benefit of transporting stuff easier. The real question is if magic develops, because when knowledge literally is power, you don't really want to share it with those that might become adversaries. This keeping of knowledge means that likely many developments will be made and then lost because the only guy who knows about it died

One reason you forgot is the apocalyptic reset: Most of the popular fantasy worlds are built on ruins of more advanced previous civilizations that blew themselves up with magic and/or science.

arcanum of steamworks and magick obscura covered perfectly why people would pursue technology despite magic existing.

I feel like one of the big reasons is just that authors don't understand the lengths of time they're talking about. It seems very frequent for fantasy stories to treat 1000 years like 100 and 100 years like 10 years.

So the funny thing is, when you mention going from steam power to nuclear power? Its all actually steam power. Nuclear power works by boiling water to produce steam, using the nuclear reaction as a heat source.

In a sense both Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones take place in a post-apocalyptic setting. Westeros is full of architecture and technology that exceeds the current civilizations. Mankind in Lord of the Rings is nowhere near the highs of Numenor.

So this is rather a long one, my apologies for the text wall, but I had some thoughts in response. Regarding the "magic does it better" argument, as the video covered, some fantasy worlds, (like game of thrones or lord of the rings) are relatively low-magic settings, at least for your average person, and yet the phenomena of stasis remains in these stories even when magic is not present as the counterbalancing force. And in cases where benevolent magic is either so low-powered, or so uncommon that most people simply would not have the option of approaching a magic user for help with their problem, other solutions will emerge to fill the gap. The second issue with that theory is the uneven distribution of resources in a feudal society, even if magic users are extremely common, the nobility WILL hoard them, or at least the most powerful, and make it much harder for the proletariat to access that help, as such, the struggle to survive remains, and thus still presents a pressure which could drive innovation. As to the, "very old beings would just double-down on what they know" argument... ehhhh, Curiosity is a pretty defining part of sapient life, if you DO have thousands of years to mess around with an unexplored field, some percentage of people would, there is also a degree of plateauing possible with overspecialization in a single field, that's part of the reason the "elven polyglot" is such an enduring concept, not to mention some people just get bored and decide to explore other interests. More to the point, mortal races without the kind of time to reach the same mastery in magic as an elf, might want to develop something any mortal can use with much less time training to balance the scales of power differential, especially if there is conflict between them. Unless a setting is all elves, it's unlikely the stagnation of a single nation within a fantasy world would be reflected across its entirety. Also the "people become more conservative as they age" adage is... at best poorly substantiated, and at worst actually counter-factual, it's a little complicated, the boomer situation is really more an example of a specific generation with specific causes rather than a broader trend, and even then was the generation just being more conservative overall rather than becoming such. The story, or as I prefer, the Doylist perspective is getting closer to the root of the issue, but you're approaching it from the wrong direction, rather than celebrating the perpetual romanticism of a particular moment in time of some fantasy (and some sci-fi, looking at you star wars) belies a lack of imagination on the part of the writer, and on a broader meta-textual level, the limited imaginations of audiences and multiple writers at large, it is a form of narrative stagnation where we keep recycling the same ideas, long-divorced from their original contexts, to the point that they no longer represent themes and ideas, but instead archetypes and totems of themselves. Which isn't to say that some fantasy can't be fun, but these settings in stasis receive the most criticism when part of large, overarching stories that span thousands of years in-universe, and multiple instalments in the real world, THAT is the reason people are criticising Skyrim in particular for this, it is also an accusation levelled at that writing team in other contexts, like Bethesda's handling of the fallout universe. I can't speak to every universe people raise an eyebrow over, but the meta-textual aspect cuts both ways. Lastly, with suppression of new ideas, this is the most plausible argument presented, but it's worth acknowledging that such barriers have been present in real world history before, and still been overcome, as well as the fact that technology is still capable of emerging among the powerful and their interests, perhaps there are even political reasons for a kingdom to ostracise magic users in favour of emerging technology. If there truly are no costs or limitations to magic in a given setting that would complicate universal reliance, then that itself is somewhat lazy writing which treats it as a universal panacea. In addition, once an idea has been discovered, even if there is an intent to suppress it from the proletariat, the powerful will attempt to appropriate it for their own use, you simply just don't leave money and power on the table like that. Assuming that mages themselves would be the ones hiding this knowledge ignores other political, economic and governmental actors, assuming a rather Mageocratic society where all decision making is handled by them directly. Also, if the conditions for an idea to emerge are possible once, then they will emerge again, history is full of examples of parallel developments of technologies by unrelated parties, the notion that a controlling organization of mages would be able to keep on top of every single example of groundbreaking new tech before the information dispersed into the broader community is a fragile premise, and that's ignoring entirely those other nations or factions who may see benefit and thus provide enough military aid to counterbalance a smaller number of magic users. it doesn't matter if you can kill a thousand medieval soldiers in six seconds if ten thousand are deployed, likewise for wards and their ability to repel arrows and spears, magic is typically not infinite. Ah yes, the god question. Gods of science, knowledge or discovery are fairly common in fiction, even in fantasy stories that have gods of magic that would have the most to gain by suppressing tech, they don't tend to be the single most dominant force in the divine hierarchy. Given the polytheistic formation of a lot of fantasy settings, different gods would likely work at cross purposes to each other, some supporting technology and others opposing it. And that isn't even getting into the fantasy gods that have a more hands-off approach. Lastly, regarding the romanticisation of pastoralism, it's... notable that a lot of these higher-magic settings are explicitly putting a lot of the benefits gained from industrialization back into this framework, to me that speaks less of an attachment to rural living, and more a desire to move past the current destructive and exploitative paradigm, but looking to the past isn't how we do that.

Sorry, my magitech brain doesnt accept medieval stasis should be a thing.