On Worldbuilding — Island Civilisations! [ GoT | Japan | Ghibli ]

World Building Island Civilizations

This video discusses how island environments can inform the culture and belief systems of civilizations that live on them. The video explores the relationship between islands and water, language and metaphor, and mythical islands.

Culture

• George R.R. Martin's Greyjoys in Game of Thrones are an example of how an inhospitable island environment can shape a civilization's culture.

• The Greyjoys' religion centers around answering the question "why is the world so hard and cruel?" Their answer is that it's a dog-eat-dog world, and being strong means taking what you need.

• Not all islands are inhospitable like the Iron Islands. Hawaii, for example, has a fertile environment that inspires different philosophical questions and value systems.

• Polynesia in Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines series sees cities themselves become like islands in a dystopian wasteland world.

Language and Metaphor

• New Zealand's Maori sayings use island and ocean imagery to create metaphors for lazy people or those who contribute the most.

• Robert Jordan uses sea people in his Wheel of Time series where ruling the ocean is equivocated to having the greatest power a civilization can have.

Mythical Island

• It's worth considering not just what your island civilization is like but also what the rest of the world thinks of them because islands have held a strange place in cultural zeitgeist as divine idealized or magical places.

Island World Building

This section explores how island world building can play into a tense story. It discusses the mythologizing of islands and how it is affected by distance, technology, and cultural diversity.

Mythologizing Islands

• Islands are often mythologized as distant magical places that we cannot reach.

• The distance and difficulty of reaching some island civilizations allow us to mythologize them as well as being vastly different because they may have evolved independently.

• In our technologically advanced era, we don't mythologize islands as much because we can pretty easily find out what they're really like.

Conflict in Lupita Castle in the Sky

• Lupita Castle in the Sky features a floating city called Lapita that few in the world have seen.

• The belief that the city will bring power and riches creates conflict between different factions at war with one another.

Cultural Diversity

• Archipelagos are far more prone to cultural diversity with different practices, religions, and even languages developing on different islands because of geographic isolation.

• In Greg Egan's Diaspora, humans are digital beings who all live in these sort of giant hard drives but each hard drive is pretty isolated from the others kind of like an island. They develop vastly different cultures in that digital sphere.

Island Politics

This section discusses how archipelagos affect political setup. It also explores how archipelagos foster decentralized power structures and multi-island nations are especially prone to quotas where different groups are legally required to be represented in parliament.

Political Setup

• Archipelagos naturally foster decentralized power structures like a federal system with islands within the archipelago governing themselves.

• Multi-island nations are especially prone to quotas where different groups are legally required to be represented in parliament.

• Earthsea is an archipelago with a history full of kings, queens, and warlords trying to establish a long-lasting multi-island empire and struggling and failing to do so.

Cultural Diversity

• Archipelagos are also far more prone to cultural diversity with different practices, religions, and even languages developing on different islands because of geographic isolation.

Environmental Determinism

This section discusses how ethnic linguistic and cultural diversity is more influenced by other forces that you should not forget trade religious proselytization colonialism war and so many others we can't just reduce it to environmental determinism.

Other Influences

• Ethnic linguistic and cultural diversity is more influenced by other forces that you should not forget trade religious proselytization colonialism war and so many others we can't just reduce it to environmental determinism.

Island Nations and World-Building

This transcript discusses the unique characteristics of island nations and how they can be incorporated into world-building in fiction. It covers topics such as piracy, democracy, corporate power, technological disparity, and ocean trade.

Piracy and Political Entities

• Pirates are often associated with archipelagos like the Caribbean and Philippines due to their natural advantages for movement around a series of islands.

• Floating islands can be havens for pirates and lowlifes who cannot be purged because people simply hide or escape. This makes exerting force over them difficult.

• Islands and archipelagos are naturally more democratic due to smaller populations having more direct access to government.

Corporate Power

• Corporations have become so powerful that they can manipulate small governments or islands to give them favorable regulations.

• Shell Oil controls over 20% of Nigeria's petroleum resources, which has allowed them to flaunt state laws regarding oil spills and environmental damage.

• Island nations often face similar pressures from corporate power due to their size.

Technological Disparity and Ocean Trade

• The British Empire was able to expand rapidly due to technological disparity (better weapons, faster ships, greater resource production) during the industrial revolution.

• Tolkien drew on technological disparity in creating his Numenorean island empire where flying ships gave them an advantage over enemies.

• The British Empire also rose during an era in which ocean trade was booming with the collapse of long-distance land trade routes like the Silk Road.

Overall, this transcript provides insights into how island nations can be used effectively in world-building by incorporating their unique characteristics such as piracy, democracy, corporate power, technological disparity, and ocean trade.

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