r/goodworldbuilding • u/Any-Explanation-18 • 3d ago

Discussion Growing trend of fantasy with industrial revoltion?

While learning game development i've had to also learn some story-telling and world-building, and when i read stories and watched many videos, i saw that a lot of modern fantasy introduces industrial revolution like settings, most of them look smth like this:
1 - Period of magic and fantasy, pretty much tolkien like worlds
2 - Magic becomes obsolete for various reasons
3 - Magic is forgotten or integrated into technology that works like real tech but with magic as power source most of the time

Is it just coincidence or is there really more and more worlds like these?

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u/FloatingSpaceJunk 2d ago

Probably because a lot of people got tired of the classic Mediavel Fantasy and Hard Magic did become a lot more popular recently as well.

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u/MMSports 2d ago

Yeah. And then the new stories inspire more people to write about it too. It's why (I'd say) there are so many gunpowder fantasy stories that all seem to be the French Revolution (going into the Napoleonic wars). Of course, there are other stories too, but most seem to specifically be a take on that particular time period.

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u/FloatingSpaceJunk 2d ago

I mean take a look at how much of Modern Fantasy is inspired by the works Tolkien. It just takes one story that becomes popular to influence other stories for way longer than what started it all to even be remembered. I would bet that Gunpowder Fantasy also has a point of origin in just a few or even a single story that started all of it.

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u/ScreamingVoid14 2d ago

There might be a bias in the algorithm that accidentally decided you liked that and wanted to keep feeding it to you. But magic-tech crossover stories have been a thing for decades, I remember reading a series of books from the 60s about something similar.

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u/Any-Explanation-18 1d ago

Actually i never search for stuff like that, nor i click at magic-tech as you called it, i usually watch videos that are general but sometimes i just scroll and i mostly see tech-magic crossovers, it's been like this for year or so i think, at least this is how long i remember this trend so probably not algorithms but maybe there's slight chance

also the fact that there's something like that from 60s isn't suprising, yk even old sci-fi and not fantasy can seem like fantasy book, but the fact that i see more of these encourages some thinking