Ipse dixit, et facta sunt.He spoke, and they were made.
Why fantasy keeps landing in pseudo‑England
Sibley K.
Why fantasy keeps landing in pseudo-England
Fantasy is brilliant at travelling thousands of imaginary miles and still ending up in a muddy market square beneath a castle that feels suspiciously like a rebranded English county, as you buy a wormy apple from a cart. Change the place names, add three moons, give the king a dragon, rename Christianity after a flame or seven too-familiar gods, slide Scandinavia a bit north and Italy a bit south, stick an apostrophe in someone’s surname, and lo! We’re back in the same genre-default “Old World.”
Disclaimer right off: there’s nothing wrong with European fantasy. I adore it and was weaned on it. Europe has enough bloodshed, folklore, religious terror, dynastic stupidity, collapsing empires, plague, weird saints, enchanted forests, and badly behaved aristocrats to sustain the genre forever.
The problem is that fantasy’s idea of the “Old World” has often been astonishingly small.
Eurasia as a corrective, not a costume
Between the familiar poles of “medieval Europe” and the equally flattening “Asian fantasy” sits a region that has spent millennia demonstrating exactly how complicated fictional worlds ought to be, and yet been constantly misheard or outright ignored. Eurasia deserves more fantasy, and not simply as scenery showcasing “the exotic east,” nor as the place the protagonist visits to buy silk, narcotics, and a mysterious curved sword before returning to the part of the map where History Apparently Happens.
Eurasia is useful to fantasy because it destroys the very concept of fictional neatness. And fantasy could stand to have a little more destroyed neatness in general.
The world is more interesting at the crossroads
The most compelling thing about Eurasia is not any single culture; rather, it’s what happens when cultures cannot stop colliding into one another. Anatolia alone should make fantasy writers mildly ashamed of themselves. It has been Hittite, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Armenian, Persian, Seljuk, Ottoman, and many things besides (sometimes consecutively, sometimes inconveniently at the same time; and boy has it left folks with Opinions). Temples become churches, churches become mosques, fortresses acquire new walls, cities acquire new names, and languages absorb other people’s words.
Point being: nobody arrives on a blank map. That’s one of the fundamental truths of history and one of the things fantasy most often forgets, which is a damn shame. Too many imaginary worlds claim five thousand years of civilization while looking as if someone pressure-washed the continent between dynasties in the same colors of Ren Faire. Real places are more often than not archaeological arguments: a conqueror moves into a palace someone else built; a population keeps cooking the food of people their grandparents allegedly despised; a religious festival acquires three mutually contradictory origin stories; a ruined civilization survives in street names; an empire insists it has “purified” the nation while conducting half its bureaucracy in vocabulary borrowed from the people it conquered.
This is not messy worldbuilding but simply worldbuilding. Fantasy often treats cultural mixture as an exceptional condition. Eurasian history treats it as just another day.
We have enough “horse barbarians” tyvm
The Eurasian steppe has suffered particularly badly at fantasy’s hands. For centuries, steppe societies built immense political networks across distances that sedentary states struggled to control. Nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples developed sophisticated systems of diplomacy, kinship, military organization, commerce, and political allegiance. Fantasy looked at all of this and concluded: big men on horses, sometimes with braids, occasionally a baddie named khan.
I disagree.
The steppe offers an entirely different set of assumptions about civilization:
What if political power does not radiate outward from a stone capital, but the mobility itself is infrastructure?
What if a ruler governs through kinship networks, tribute, negotiated allegiance, and seasonal movement?
What if the terrifying landscape is not a dark forest full of wolves but an open plain where you can see your enemy coming from twenty miles away and still cannot escape him?
What if the roads matter more than the borders, and that changes what stories are possible?
Cities should have cultural sediment
Central Asia presents another baffling omission: Samarkand, Bukhara, Khiva, Merv, Kashgar. These are names attached to worlds of merchants, scholars, conquerors, pilgrims, diplomats, craftsmen, and travellers moving between China, Persia, India, the Mediterranean, and the steppe. Fantasy writers spend tremendous energy inventing “crossroads cities.” Meanwhile history has several available and is gently shaking them our way in cupped palms like No Face with the bath tokens.
The Silk Roads (plural) were never a single road carrying bolts of silk politely between two civilizations, but dynamic networks. Goods moved, religions moved, diseases moved, technologies moved, stories moved. People married strangers; languages acquired loanwords; gods acquired local accents. A merchant could understand the world in ways a king could not because merchants had to know what waited beyond the next customs post. That is fertile ground for fantasy because fantasy thrives on circulation. Magic itself becomes more interesting when it travels: one civilization considers a substance sacred, another weaponizes it, a third turns it into medicine, a fourth declares it heretical while quietly importing several tons per year. Now the magic has history layered with politics.
This is, not coincidentally, much closer to how Raptoraem is conceived. Its world sits in a hemisphere called Veilmeer, surrounded by the largely uncharted God’s Mouth Oceana: a sea sufficiently violent and supernaturally ill-rumoured that nobody has yet managed to turn global exploration into a smooth imperial pastime. So the known world presses inward instead. Cultures collide because they have nowhere convenient to disappear to, and Raptoraem, with its dirty, dirty Pitbound, sits among those collisions.
Rodos carries echoes of Turkey and Cyprus. Suraya draws from West Africa and Egypt. Drachenherz has a Prusso-Germanic character built over a Latinate imperial past. Chauveaux bends toward Bordeaux. Salthaven looks toward the Philippines. Sundhara takes inspiration from Rajput-era India. Solarium carries the polished menace of British imperialism. Lukomorje draws from Slavic Ukraine. Akari looks toward northern Japan.
None of these places exists to perform a costume change but because the world around Raptoraem is meant to exert pressure upon it: trade pressure, military pressure, linguistic pressure, religious pressure, migration pressure, imperial pressure. The city is a crossroads because crossroads produce, imo, vastly better problems. And problems are what worldbuilding is for.
Stop building cultures like theme parks, gawd
One of fantasy’s stranger habits is dividing entire civilizations according to aesthetic: these are the Desert People, the Mountain People, the Horse People, the Sophisticated Merchant People, the Mysterious Island People, as if every civilization has agreed on one fabric, one cuisine, one political philosophy, and one hat. Actual Eurasia has never cooperated with this kind of filing system. The Caucasus alone is an act of cognitive aggression against anyone attempting to make a clean ethnolinguistic map. Mountain valleys can separate communities living astonishingly close to one another; empires arrive from different directions; religions overlap; languages persist, disappear, reappear, borrow, and mutate hilariously.
It is precisely the sort of region fantasy writers claim to want: mountains, blood feuds, fortresses, trade corridors, tiny kingdoms, great empires, multiple religions, ancient grievances, impossible languages. And yet the genre is still astonishingly fond of giving an entire continent one stripe of Ye Olde English accent.
This is where Eurasian history offers a useful corrective. Culture is not merely painted on, but sediment. Every conquest leaves something behind, as does every migration. Even hatred leaves something behind, because people are extremely good at despising their neighbours while eating their food, wearing their clothing, and stealing their vocabulary.
A convincing fantasy culture should therefore contain contradictions:
Its soldiers may say prayers inherited from one enemy.
Its bureaucrats may use titles inherited from another.
Its aristocracy may claim descent from conquerors whose language nobody at court speaks anymore.
Its cuisine may depend on ingredients introduced by merchants the priesthood officially condemns.
Its religion may insist that a particular shrine has always belonged to them—while the shrine disagrees.
Now the place is alive.
Eurasia breaks the East/West toy box
There is another reason this region matters particularly to fantasy: it makes the simplistic division between “Western” and “Eastern” settings collapse almost immediately. Where exactly does Europe stop and Asia begin? This becomes a surprisingly entertaining question if your goal is to ruin a dinner party. Anatolia sits in both. The Caucasus refuses straightforward classification. Russian history runs across both. Persian power repeatedly shaped western and central Asia. Turkic peoples founded states stretching from Central Asia to the Mediterranean. Greek, Persian, Arab, Turkic, Mongol, Slavic, Armenian, Georgian, and countless other peoples have spent centuries trading, fighting, intermarrying, and occasionally insisting they have absolutely nothing in common while sipping coffee inside buildings proving otherwise.
This ambiguity is immensely useful. Fantasy has inherited a deeply modern tendency to imagine cultures as bounded units: Red Country, Blue Country, Green Country, each containing one People who have disliked one another for twelve hundred years for reasons explained in Chapter Three. Eurasian history meanwhile offers something more believable. Identity can be local, dynastic, religious, linguistic, tribal, professional, and imperial simultaneously. A person might feel loyalty to a city rather than a nation; to a clan rather than a government; to a faith stretching across five kingdoms; to an emperor who does not speak their language; to a trading community scattered across half the known world. That produces much richer political fiction, and much richer characters.
Empire becomes more interesting too
Fantasy empires are often suspiciously uncomplicated: they conquer, they tax, they wear black, sometimes they have eagles on their banners. Real empires generally have to perform far more exhausting administrative gymnastics. They govern people who speak different languages, worship different gods, obey different customary laws, and occasionally live somewhere cavalry cannot conveniently reach. So empires negotiate by co-opting local elites; tolerating some religions and suppressing others; standardizing measurements and time; creating legal exceptions; culling certain populations; encouraging marriages; forbidding them; proclaiming universal civilization while quietly depending on interpreters. This is considerably more useful to fantasy than merely giving the imperial soldiers matching helmets.
Solarium, for example, was interesting to me because imperial power is not merely a question of armies but a question of systems: prestige, law, language, economic dependency, and the assumption that one’s own way of organizing the world is simply what civilization looks like. That is far closer to the historical machinery of empire than “Evil Kingdom Sends Legions Again.” And once you begin thinking in those terms, resistance becomes more interesting too. A conquered people does not simply preserve an untouched ancient culture until liberation. They change as their circumstances do. Their enemy changes them; they change their enemy. Rebels inherit imperial institutions and flip them upside down in farcical drinking songs. Their revolutionaries speak the empire’s language because many are leftovers from the Empire's disgruntled bureaucracy. Their nationalist myths may themselves be products of imperial history.
Congratulations: now everyone is compromised <3
Folklore gets stranger when you leave the usual woods
There is also the supernatural problem. Western fantasy has inherited an immensely successful package of creatures and cosmologies from Germanic, Celtic, Scandinavian, and Christian traditions: elves, dwarves, dragons, fairies, demons, ghosts, witches, the occasional deeply inconvenienced saint. All excellent material and I love it to bits.
But after several generations of fantasy literature, many of these creatures arrive carrying enormous genre expectations. The reader already knows what an elf probably looks like.
Eurasian folklore opens far stranger doors. Across Slavic, Turkic, Persian, Caucasian, Central Asian, Siberian, and other traditions, categories blur. Spirits attach themselves to homes, mountains, water, weather, and ancestry itself. Older supernatural beings survive beneath newer religions, not so much syncretized as given a post-modern facelift. One region’s monster becomes another region’s guardian. Even the distinction between spirit, demon, ancestor, and deity can become unstable. That instability is valuable. It reminds writers that supernatural systems do not need to behave like zoological classifications. You do not need:
GENUS: Demon
TYPE: Lesser
WEAKNESS: Silver
LOOT: 14 cupcakes
Sometimes a river is dangerous because generations of people believe it remembers insults and can snatch those who fail to perform the correct rites. Much better. The unexplored God’s Mouth Oceana in Raptoraem exists partly because I wanted that uncertainty to survive. Maybe the sea is merely catastrophic. Maybe there are eldritch things in it. Maybe every sailor is lying. Maybe three contradictory nations are describing the same phenomenon. Nobody has sailed far enough to produce a helpful encyclopedia.
I like worlds with parts missing. Historical people had incomplete maps too, and I fully believe we still do, no matter what petty conceit Google Maps would have us cherish.
Fantasy doesn’t need more “exotic”
This is where the caveat matters. None of this means fantasy writers should descend upon Eurasia with a shopping basket: one Mongolian coat, two Georgian towers, a Turkish coffee pot, three Slavic monsters, some Sanskrit-looking lettering—voila! That is a ransacking of Pinterest, not cultural curiosity. The useful lesson is structural rather than cosmetic.
Study:
Why cities appear where they do.
How geography changes politics.
What trade does to language.
How conquest changes food.
How religious conversion actually works.
How empires accommodate people they cannot easily replace.
What happens when migrants become minorities and minorities become rulers.
How a culture remembers humiliations and invents victories.
Why borderlands produce identities the imperial centre finds annoying.
Then build.
For me, at least, the approach is far more interesting than assigning real-world civilizations to fantasy nations one-for-one. Raptoraem is not New York. Rodos is not Turkey. Sundhara is not Rajasthan. Lukomorje is not Ukraine. They are fictional cultures constructed from historical pressures, aesthetic influences, geographical relationships, and deliberate distortions. The important thing is not resemblance but the ways they play off each other.
If two civilizations have traded for eight hundred years, I want evidence. If one conquered the other, I want evidence. If refugees crossed the border three generations ago, I want evidence. Put it in the food, swear words, architecture, surnames and the sly jokes people make about neighbouring provinces. Put it in the grandmother insisting a dish belongs to her people while another grandmother three hundred miles away is saying exactly the same thing.
History is not a set of boxes
Perhaps that is the greatest lesson Eurasia offers fantasy: civilization is not a collection of sealed containers. Or if it is sloshing in a container, then that container is leaky. Borders leak, languages leak, religions leak, empires leak. Stories absolutely leak. People carry things with them—a song, a weapon, a prayer, a recipe, a superstition, a grudge... sometimes all six. And after several centuries nobody can agree who owned any of them first.
So yes, by all means, let's keep the lord's castles. Keep the enchanted forests. Keep the knights. Keep the gloomy northern king who has apparently not seen sunlight since the reign of his grandfather. But fantasy has an entire continent’s worth of other historical instincts available to it: caravan empires, mountain confederacies, port cities, steppe politics, diasporas, multilingual courts, religious borderlands, island trade networks, imperial colonies, commercial republics, nomadic powers, cities that have changed names six times and loyalties nine, places where three civilizations claim the same hero, places where nobody agrees whether the old gods are dead, places where the local language contains so many borrowed words that purity becomes a farce, places where history is not a backdrop but stealthily slipping its hand into your pocket for your wallet.
That is the kind of world I hope for Veilmeer to be: a pressure system circling the same routes. Raptoraem sits in the middle of it, inconveniently, which feels precisely where a fantasy city ought to be. And perhaps after another fifty novels about a farm boy leaving his pseudo-English village on a quest, we can finally put the poor bastard on a ship bound for somewhere messy and hard to write home about.
Assuming the God’s Mouth Oceana doesn’t eat him first.