Most of the fanstasy content (books, movies, games etc.) are set in medieval times. Why not in different eras of the humanity? What is so special about medieval era?
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There are a few things that contribute to this particular aesthetic for fantasy fiction, but one significant thing to note is that there are plenty of fantasy stories set in other time periods, like the Dresden Files books which are set in the modern day, or RA by QNTM which features magic being discovered in the 1970’s. When an author departs from standard tropes it can be really interesting.
Really the largest reasons fantasy is often set in a medieval period is simply because that’s sort of what we’re used to; books like the Lord of the Rings set up a lot of our standard fantasy tropes, and it can be sort of jarring to see those tropes ignored. A lot of people just kind of expect fantasy to mean medieval, and divergence from that can hurt sales.
Another thing to note is that the “medieval period” displayed in a fantasy book can often cover a very wide range of potential time. We had people wearing armour and riding around on horseback shooting bows and arrows from something like 500-1600 AD. Many fantasy novels are set in a sort of generic mix-and-match time period that might include technology or social developments that come from all sorts of time (sort of like how the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park actually come from totally different periods across like 200 million years). So they aren’t really set at a specific time or level of technological development more than just kind of “old timey”.
Yet another factor is that, generally, if you want magic to be a big feature in your story, you need that magic to be *useful*. You want it to be something that, you know, matters to the plot. If you have high technology like an X-Ray machine, then you don’t really need a magic spell to identify illness. If you have cellphones with facetime, you don’t need scrying stones. Imagine if magic was discovered tommorow, but the only spell most people could learn to cast was a fireball. I don’t know about you, but I don’t actually need to know how to cast fireball, I can just buy a gun from walmart.
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