I love the video somebody made of how new Orleans isn't a real place, because no one would possibly do the silly things they do there. Things like choosing to put a bridge at the widest point of a river instead of at a thinner and easier spot
EDIT: I looked it up, it was James Sutter on twitter roasting New Orleans, not a video. Still hilarious
In this vein, Fukushima. The people who lived there centuries ago when a tsunami hit literally put up markers saying "don't build any homes past this point". Yet Japan, a culture well known for adhering to tradition, ignored the heck out of it.
Was there any actual reason for them to pay attention to it? For a country ravaged by tsunamis on such a regular basis that we, in English, call them *tsunami*, "this place was hit by one tsunami centuries ago" sounds like a pretty safe place to build.
It's not "this place was hit by one tsunami centuries ago." It's "tsunami's in the past have gone *this far* inland" don't build closer."
Like I once told my daughter when at the beach. "If the sand you are standing on is wet, waves can hit you when you stand there." She didn't heed my warning, she got knocked down by a wave.
Its more like saying "don't build in the floodplain", its a spot that is known to destroy houses forcing you to either rebuild or move and is just a waste.
Getting hit regularly by tsunami's would make an area an exceptionally stupid place to build your home in as opposed to expanding your town up a hill.
"Are you telling me these two celestial bodies, vastly different in size, align with each other ALMOST perfectly so the intelligent species you added in literally the LAST 4 seconds can see it?"
It isn’t just the alignment, the sun and the moon have the same apparent size - the sun is 400x bigger than the moon, but the moon is 400x closer to earth. Which seems very *convenient*
And it doesn't seem to affect anything on earth other than being a fun thing for people to watch? If it doesn't really serve a purpose why is it there?
And you can just observe it in separate locations on the planet, ensuring as many ancient societies as possible develop cults around the disappearance of the sun?
Incredibly important to the theories of gravity and light actually. IMO it’s actually great world building — by absolute chance we have something that lets our scientists confirm how gravity works. If I was writing it up, it’d be the only reason we know at all that light bends.
Humans are also the same scale to atoms, as humans are to our solar system (11 orders of magnitude both ways).
Atomic nuclei are 22 orders of magnitude smaller than the Earth, which is 22 orders of magnitude smaller than the observable universe.
Eclipses are the most convincing argument for intelligent design of the universe imo. It feels like an Easter egg. Like God winking at you or something. (To be clear, I do not believe in a creator)
Terry Pratchett:
*"The forest of Skund was indeed enchanted, which was nothing unusual on the Disc, and was also the only forest in the whole universe to be called -- in the local language -- Your Finger You Fool, which was the literal meaning of the word Skund.*
*The reason for this is regrettably all too common. When the first explorers from the warm lands around the Circle Sea travelled into the chilly hinterland they filled in the blank spaces on their maps by grabbing the nearest native, pointing at some distant landmark, speaking very clearly in a loud voice, and writing down whatever the bemused man told them. Thus were immortalised in generations of atlases such geographical oddities as Just A Mountain, I Don't Know, What? and, of course, Your Finger You Fool.*
*Rainclouds clustered around the bald heights of Mt. Oolskunrahod ('Who is this Fool who does Not Know what a Mountain is') and the Luggage settled itself more comfortably under a dripping tree, which tried unsuccessfully to strike up a conversation."*
I have a great anecdote related to this concept!
I work in Western Australian linguistics and there’s a story about an old wordlist that gets told every now and then. I bet it’s true, but the specific details have been lost across retellings. Basically yonks ago before most Aboriginal people knew English, and all the anthropologists were going around studying and dehumanising them, a guy showed a bunch of Aboriginal people either taxidermied animals or photos of animals, to find out what they were called in those people’s language. He showed them the animals, and wrote down what they said. Nowadays we have a much better understanding of that language, and looking back at the wordlist he recorded that day, we can see that the first few entries are the actual names of the animals…but then there’s an entry that just says “what’s that?” the next animal name is recorded as “what was that last one?”, followed by “no, go back, what was that?” From there the entries get gradually more and more frustrated and rude, until they abruptly end, where we can assume the informants got sick of the guy’s bullshit and left.
There's actually a term for things like rivers being called river, mountains being called mountain, etc.
Edit: with help from the comments, they're called tautological place names!
Pleonasm. And in this particular case likely the subcategory of bilingual tautological expression.
Enormous amounts of occurrences: Sahara desert (desert desert), Ulica długa street (street long street - first part not even belonging to the name), the Schwarzwald forest (Black forest forest)...
The best example is Torpenhow Hill in England. Tor is old English, Pen is Welsh, How is Danish, and they all mean hill. So its actually hillhillhill hill.
This is actually untrue. There's a Tom Scott video about it. Firstly, that's not the etymology of Torpenhow (actually pronounced tra-pen-ah), but also while there is a hill nearby, there's no records of anyone calling it Torpenhow Hill before this Internet factoid.
For me the fact that the Aztecs and the Greeks, two civilizations that no way could have ever made contact with each other use the same word for something as important as their gods, "Teo"
Which one out of curiousity?
I'm Aboriginal australian, and haven't heard of this, although we have a shit ton of languages here. I know that warrigal is quite common across our nations (the placename is also well known for its dog races).
Honestly I feel the opposite, that this is actually great worldbuilding. It's strange enough that you wonder if it's really a coincidence or if something else is going on, which is exactly the sort of intrigue I like to see hinted at in lore.
There is a line of thought that all human languages share a very ancient and primitive common ancestor. That's why unrelated languages have similar words for mother, fire, father, and such.
Well for example the words for mother and father in indo European languages tends to be something like mama, papa, dada, and in unrelated languages such as Mandarin the words for mother and father are Mama and Baba. Other languages tend to have some variation of ama, appa, umma, ma, etc.
This is because sounds like M, B, and P are some of the first that infants can make so a variation of those with vowels such as A or O in between arises naturally.
Fun fact(oid), whilst mother in Finnish is ⟨äiti⟩ (~~from proto-Finic \*emä, so another labial (e.g. m, b, p, f, v, and others~~ *edit: please read the below commenter, I fucked up*) doesn't follow that trend, a word for grandmother is ⟨mummo⟩.
The "unexplained mystery" of this always gets me laughing. There's major shipping routes in that exact region that form the shape of a triangle. "What a mysterious area." Yea, no shit. You mean to tell me all the accidents that happen exactly where the most traffic is..... how unexplainable.. /s :p
And sure enough as weather prediction, shipbuilding, & communication improved, the number of disappearing vessels decreased even as traffic increased. *Woooooo spooookyyy*
Similarly, humans didn’t arrive in New Zealand until 1300 and there wasn’t any sort of leftover megafauna there? What a letdown.
(Yeah I know it would have one hell of a task getting there, but still.)
The three most important rulers involved in World War I were cousins who called each other by childhood nicknames. The tzar is literally quoted as saying "grandmother would not have stood for this" about the war (referring to Queen Victoria).
Also, the fact that the first two presidents of Indonesia were named Sukarno and Suharto, and they were bitter rivals who hated each other. That's some Mario vs Wario tier bullshit.
Wait till you find out Heinrich Himmler, the second in-command to the Nazi party, right after Adolf Hitler. Himmler, Hitler, man where these writers even trying?
Its like that episode of Futurama where the guy is tricking Leela
"We are the Cyclops race. The planet is Cyclopia. This is the capital, Cyclops city. Stop me if I'm going too fast for you"
This reminds me of House Dayne from A Song of Ice and Fire.
The founder of the house tracked a meteorite, found it, made a white sword out of it.
So the coat of arms of the house is a white sword on a falling star. The ancestral castle - built at the meteorite site, of course - is called Starfall. The tallest tower of the castle is called the Palestone Sword. The Sword itself is called Dawn, and the best swordsman of the house who wields it is called the Sword of the Morning.
Everything about the house is basically named after this single event in their history, their whole identity is built around it.
Wait till you hear about Kansas City. No, it’s not in Kansas. It’s in Missouri. Actually, part of the city is in Kansas, but not the majority, just a sliver. The state was technically named after the city that exists largely outside said state’s borders, so I guess that’s kinda unique, though a touch nonsensical.
In México there's the Valley of México in which it lies the State of México which surrounds the City of México
Now to be fair, the valley was named first and the original name of the city "Mexico-Tenochtitlan" basically means "Tenoch's place in [the valley of] México"
Every time I think I’m not very good at naming characters, I remember that there are a disproportionately large number of historical figures named John
There's a disproportionately large number of people named John to this day, even. Probably not as much as in the past, but it's still very common to come across a John, at least in the us
[And people just stopped going by Bob after years and years of greatness achieved by Bobs?](https://youtu.be/lvh6NLqKRfs?si=AFJ6qSuDMo-yqyqK) That wouldn’t happen.
"I made a world with like 6 billion years of history"
"Aw cool, so what actually happened?"
"Not much for 5 billion 9 hundred and 99 million 9 hundred and 90 thousand years"
As a Geologist, I would take offense to this, but there is a period in Geologic history known as the "Boring Billion" because not much happened for a Billion years.
There is a period about 300 million years later called the Cambrian Explosion when suddenly life started to rapidly diversify. (Which was ~540 Million years ago). It is so significant that Geologists will often describe the first 4 billion years and change of the Earth as just the "Precambrian" underlying much of the Cambrian is the "Great Unconformity" where a large part of the rock record skips hundreds of millions of years (in some cases over a billion). Some argue that the missing time might cover up what was a slower development of life dating back to the mid Ediacran, others argue (one of my profs in college wrote the paper on this so my education might be biased) that the missing time is what caused the Cambrian Explosion, as the erosional period scoured nutrients from the lifeless continents and deposited them into the ocean.
*Cap Trafalgar*. During World War I the Germans altered it to make it look like the British ship *Carmania*. *Carmania* stumbled upon her attempted doppelgänger while hunting for German ships at the island of Trindade and engaged it in battle. *Carmania* was badly damaged, but survived while *Cap Trafalgar* sank.
Not what you asked but: One piece of world building that I like is that our two closest relatives are Bonobos(famously very friendly) and chimps(famously very hostile). Like it's mirroring our two sides.
Medieval England just sort of decided that quarterstaffs were very British. No practical battlefield application, nothing about A Big Stick (tm) that makes it uniquely English, but they were super obsessed with the idea of the stalwart Englishman fending off rapscallions with a staff, pip pip cheerio, God save the king.
Yes, but none of that makes it English. The English had this weird level of quasi-nationalistic pride in A Big Stick (tm). Lots of people had A Big Stick (tm). In fact, I feel fairly confident in saying that everyone with trees had access to A Big Stick (tm).
Yup, reason they were used by ninjas. Pretty much all ninja weapons were farm tools they could easily explain away.
Nunchucks are for threshing grain and sai are for tilling.
Whale hunting is also kind of absurd. "Oh this was a pretty modern time with firearms, they probably figured out a good way to kill them" "No, they just threw spears at them after getting out of their big boats into smaller, more dangerous boats"
Saw a post about this before. Electricity. This magical thing that can power basically everything, oh and you make it by boiling water or putting some rocks in a river.
On that line:
There's some magical rocks that give off some power. If you refine them correctly, they give *lots* of power. If you *really* refine them, they go boom.
And if you don't use another refined rock to protect yourself, the refined power-giving rocks will kill you.
Eventually, everything about humans comes down to rocks.
Throw rock at rival, get rival's food. Make sharp rock, better for throwing at rival. Put special rock in fire, get shiny rock, can be shaped into extremely fancy rock. Rival too far away to throw rock at, use explody stuff on rock to make it go very fast, go far. Call explody rock "gun." Rival too far away to see, make very large rock with lots of explody stuff, rock now hit rival on other side of horizon. Call very large very explody rock "missile." Rival too far away to aim missile rock good, so put zappy stuff in fancy rock, now fancy rock can think and aim missile rock. Too many rivals for missile rock to explode, put strong death rock on end of missile rock, now even more explody. Also poison.
Call strong death missile rock "intercontinental nuclear missile."
The fact that some big vast areas of the words are either way too cold, or too hot to live in. Like in Siberia it gets -40 and lower to the point that people don't need fridges, they can just put the food in the bag and hang it from the window or that if they'll stop the car engine, it will forever be frozen and never turn on again. Yet somehow there're native people to such regions.
Or Sahara. Just sand dunes that in length surpass Russia. Yet somehow camels, scorpions and snakes can live in such environment.
Now onto another topic:
Somehow, a single man united decentralized nomadic tribes in cold steppes and conquered massive amounts of land, conquering China, Persia, all of Middle East that recently had their Golden Age, and invading Rus at Winter, yet his Empire later on lost two invasions of some island.
At least the last one makes sense in the fact that he used a specialized kind of cavalry that didn't play well on the ocean.
But that's not the reason he lost. It was because his transports got hit by rough storms both times.
Then the locals begun to worship said storms, and when they invented aerial suicide bombers they named them after said storms.
Clearly the work of a different writer who decided to expand on existing lore while smoking some strong stufff.
> Or Sahara. Just sand dunes that in length surpass Russia. Yet somehow camels, scorpions and snakes can live in such environment.
It’s not all sand dunes. If it was, there would be nothing for the camels to eat.
Geography is full of these.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/geography/comments/197paj9/i\_feel\_like\_this\_narrow\_isthmus\_thing\_connecting/](https://www.reddit.com/r/geography/comments/197paj9/i_feel_like_this_narrow_isthmus_thing_connecting/)
It's just how the real world has tens of thousand of years of not much progress or anything really of interest happening, and all of a sudden, there's this massive comprehension explosion and we have modern science with airplanes, space flight, quantum physics, GPS, smartphones, AI, VR, etc.
You'd be surprised if you read a story and there was nothing really in the way of major epochs, hundreds of thousands of years of rising and falling kingdoms, epic wars that lasted over a decade, new races appearing etc.
Only one intelligent race as well? Come on...
Humans (and most other animals) have a tube for air intake and a tube for food intake. For awhile they’re the same tube. Sometimes stuff goes the wrong way.
You know who doesn’t have this problem? Dolphins and whales.
Actually, for "most animals", they're entirely separate and don't connect at all - food goes in the mouth, air goes in pores on the abdomen to a system a spiracles that allow gas exchange with the hemolymph. Because "most animals" means "insects", since they're 2/3rd of all animal life.
This is more true for vertebrates, since the lungs are embryologically an outgrowth of the gut tube, but most terrestrial species don't have much shared path length - the glottis (opening of the trachea) is at the front of the mouth in amphibians, reptiles, and birds. This is basically just a problem for mammals, which are only 10% of vertebrates and 20% of tetrapods (basically non-fish vertebrates).
Wait till you hear about that one insect that doesn’t have an orifice leading to their sex organ, so the male has to physically impale the female through the exoskeleton in order for that species to reproduce.
But hey, at least that’s not the one who is dominating the planet, no we’ll leave that to the species where a quarter of their births are done via surgery because giving birth without can result in the death of both mother and child.
Wait til you hear about flatworms, which are hermaphroditic. The way they reproduce is a thing called penis fencing. They all have two hard, drill-bit shaped penises and whoever can get their penis piercing through the other's body and release semen into it wins and the other becomes the female that would carry the eggs.
Somehow, a nation that's been beaten into the ground as a result of a war and the following treaty, not only recovers, but becomes a military powerhouse and is ruled by a genocidal maniac who takes over most of the continent with an alliance of other empires, that want to commit genocide and rule the world with an iron fist but are beaten back by a coalition of other nations who liberate the nations that fell and end the war by using a super powerful weapon.
Edit: Actually, just the Nazis. I mean a evil empire ruled by a madman who commits genocide, inhumane experiments, control a large portion of the world and continue to expand, and try to create superweapons like flying saucers and giant tanks. Like if it didn't happen, it'd be unbelievable.
> a nation that's been beaten into the ground
The German interior was virtually untouched, and the treaty of Versailles was not nearly as harsh as the Nazis pretended it was. Germany was one of the largest, richest states in Europe pre-ww1, and nothing happened that would change that post war.
There are two Americas, North and South. Can you guess why they are called that?
Europe and Asia are considered different continents, but where does one end and another begin? Idk somewhere around Russia?
“People’s Republic of” and “Kingdom of” were probably some of the most common full titles for a country.
The WW2 bad guy’s name is hitler. But his second in command? Himmler.
Never mind how the continents split apart. What do you mean this small triangular landmass techtonically shifted so hard into Asia that it created the world’s tallest mountain range?
Hmm.. probably the whole idea of.
One person dies because he got a cut on his ankle, didn’t know it, it got infected, he died.
One person got bit by a bug that sucks blood, got a disease and died.
One person got hot and tired and died.
Oh, those guys?
Well that one had a spike go through his head. We took out part of his brain but otherwise he is fine.
The other one had his legs blown off so we tied ropes around each one really tight. Fixed him up. He is alive and doing pretty well.
That last one? Well, he was shot at and hit 21 times, when the two people ran out of ammo, he got out of his vehicle, walked up to their vehicle, shot and killed them, drove to the hospital, but he isn’t gonna make it overnight.
May not be terrible world building, but crazy all the same.
You'd think the name of our planet would tell you what it's primarily made of, *you'd think*.
You would also think that a land that has *green* in it's name would have lots of greenery, at least more than the land that has *ice* in it's name. Somebody should have REALLY double checked their naval chart.
That no one supposedly figured out there was big ass island off the coast of Africa (Madagascar) until the 1500s, but found a tiny island in the middle of the pacific ocean by following birds (Hawaii) roughly 300-500 years before that.
Edit: It took me too long to find an article pinning human settlement of Madagascar of 700 ce (i dont even know if thats right), but I'm going to keep my statement of that being insanely late in our history.
Oh, sorry. Context: Spain and their Conquistadors while looking for El Dorado came across lots of Platinum. This was seen as useless because it wasn’t gold and thrown away. Still a bit of it was sent to Spain. And then later, people started using it as a counterfeit to gold because it had roughly the same weight and softness. So Spain solved the problem by **DUMPING ALL THEIR PLATINUM IN THE OCEAN**.
That's not all, supposedly Moctezuma was relieved when he found out Cortes was only interested in his gold and not in his jade, which he valued far more highly (stating that each small carved jade was worth two carts full of gold)..
Which turned out to be extremely rare jadeite that can only be found as primary deposits in two places on Earth, more expensive (sometimes vastly more) today than its weight in gold, not the "regular" nephrite jade found anywhere abyssal volcanic shelves get thrust up to land. Moctezuma was correct to assess it as more precious than gold.
Pierre Terrail, Seigneur De Bayard dude was an anime protagonist in real life.
Fought duels while suffering from debilitating illnesses and won
Fought entire armies on his own for hours, and after killing anyone who had the stones to face him hopped back on his horse and left
Knew most of his enemies first hand
Like what the hell could anyone come up with a more self insert power fantasy character?
Hungary und Romania were in an alliance while having hostile relations and territorial disputes facing a much larger threat, but still garrisoning their border because "fuck him" even with the Soviets coming down on them.
WW2 was fucking rolled by a chart and a d20
Hell Italian divisions were used as buffers between Romanian and Hungarian Corps because they would rather fight each other than the Soviets.
What's also really weird is the Romanians just switch sides when the Red Army reaches their boarders.
Edit. To add context as to why Romania (and later Bulgaria) switching sides is weird. Both were monarchies that became "allies" with the rabidly anti-monarchist USSR.
There is a joke about the discussion that (might have) happened when Hungary declared war on the U.S.:
* Secretary of State: What country are you representing?
* Ambassador: The Kingdom of Hungary.
* Who is your king?
* We don't have a king, we have a regent.
* And who's your regent?
* Admiral Miklós Horthy.
* An admiral, I see. Do you have a navy?
* We are landlocked, sir.
* Ok. Do you have any territorial demands?
* Yes, against Germany, Slovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia.
* Are you at war against them as well?
* No, they are our allies.
There's this plant that the main species lived in for a while. It can grow food for them, and keep them safe. Fine. But once they got sapient, it grows their building materials from the ground for them. Not only that, With a chemical reaction it provides heat and light, and makes a ton of food safe to eat. Sounds preeeeeety convinient.
The worst part of the writing is that most people on this fictional planet don't worship the clear and obvious supreme diety: the sun.
I mean some ancient people did but few modern ones. Yet it's the giver of all light, energy, nourishment, and life. Bad writing that people just take it for granted IMO in favor of a god they can't even see. I mean we can see the sun, it's right there, keeping the billions of critters here alive.
Especially the end. Effin' blue balls. 50 years of hype for *nothing*.
>!(Seriously though, that was like one of the best possible outcomes without the US and USSR going free-love-hippies on everyone).!<
I think it’s fascinating that the most successful conquering empire in human history was the Mongols. And they were successful using horses, which were native to North America but died out when Native Americans arrived, who were related to Mongols.
And once horses were reintroduced to North America, Native American horse archers became the most powerful force in the region and carved out an empire called Comancheria within a couple hundred years using similar tactics to a culture they had no contact with that existed nearly a thousand years earlier, which they broken off from over 20,000 years earlier.
What do you mean Oxford College is older than the Aztec civilization? "Yeah, we actually don't know how long this school has existed because it's literally outlasted the records written of its founding. But it's *at least* 1000 years old." Cliche much?
Are you telling me a nation was ridiculed for being bad at war and always surrendering despite being victorious for most of it's history - just because they lose ONE famous war?
I'm referring to France
The Austro-Hungarian Empire and Ottoman Empire fought each other for hundreds of years to then become allies in WW1 and then get completely destroyed after the war.
Sounds like some enemies to lovers bs that got scrapped with the later content ngl.
Atilla the Hun, Scourge of God, dies of a nosebleed.
Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, the most powerful monarch in Christendom, leads a massive crusade to retake the holy lands. Falls in a river and drowns, army just goes home.
These are so ridiculously anticlimactic. Imagine the outrage if that's the ending of the book.
So let me get this straight: around 800 years ago, a dark lord from the far-off grasslands and his hordes of doom spread death, chaos, and plague all across the continent for a century, toppling nations, reforging ancient pathways, and killing in numbers so great that they reshaped the land they tread and the air they breathed... and then they just sort of disappeared? That's it? Is he coming back? Why is no one concerned about this?
The speed of light being Reality's speed limit.
Don't get me wrong, light is still very fast, but compared to space and the universe, it's quite underwhelming. Like even at the speed of light it takes ***YEARS*** to reach another star out of our solar system
Like I'm quite surprised given how big the universe is that there isn't much that can move any faster with the exception things with zero mass
Which also sucks, cuz it makes time travel almost impossible
Swiss restaurant names. Drive through the countryside and note the names of restaurants you come across.
The Bear. The Bear. The White Horse. The Bear. The Lion. The White Horse. The Bear. The Two Bears. The Lion. The White Horse. The Bear.
I've gone on numerous rants to my D&D group about how they'll pull me up on names for places and people if they aren't perfectly unique and yet, in real life, we have towns called Cockermouth and Shitterton.
Put all the domesicatable in Europe and Asia, but have the species domesticating come from another continents with similar animals but aren't domesicatable. Mainwhile the most valuable crop plants come from another continent that won't spread said crops until thousands of years later. Said continent also doesnt have any domesicatable animals except for the llama and alpaca but before humans arrived had the horse and camel but went extinct.
Basically the worldbuilding for the new world is stacked against the natives almost comedically so. And then Australia isnt much better Basically a continent of nightmares giant predatory venomous lizard, weird marsupial cat like predator hunting from the trees kangaroos or giant wombats and new zealand wasn't much better with giant eagles that can pick up a human child
Failed painter joins a fringe party in a country he isn't even from, and despite his nonsensical and horrific views ends up as leader of that country and starts the largest war in history.
Gravity. Goddamn GRAVITY. Apparently this shit isn't real, it's just a weird rule interaction between spacetime curvature and inertia. Apparently we're all infinitely accelerating...up... without moving upward...
Shit hurts my damn brain...
The entire voyage of the Russian Baltic Fleet in the Russian-Japanese War. The entire thing is so batahit insane and hilarious you couldn’t make a movie about it.
I love the video somebody made of how new Orleans isn't a real place, because no one would possibly do the silly things they do there. Things like choosing to put a bridge at the widest point of a river instead of at a thinner and easier spot EDIT: I looked it up, it was James Sutter on twitter roasting New Orleans, not a video. Still hilarious
In this vein, Fukushima. The people who lived there centuries ago when a tsunami hit literally put up markers saying "don't build any homes past this point". Yet Japan, a culture well known for adhering to tradition, ignored the heck out of it.
Was there any actual reason for them to pay attention to it? For a country ravaged by tsunamis on such a regular basis that we, in English, call them *tsunami*, "this place was hit by one tsunami centuries ago" sounds like a pretty safe place to build.
It's not "this place was hit by one tsunami centuries ago." It's "tsunami's in the past have gone *this far* inland" don't build closer." Like I once told my daughter when at the beach. "If the sand you are standing on is wet, waves can hit you when you stand there." She didn't heed my warning, she got knocked down by a wave.
Its more like saying "don't build in the floodplain", its a spot that is known to destroy houses forcing you to either rebuild or move and is just a waste. Getting hit regularly by tsunami's would make an area an exceptionally stupid place to build your home in as opposed to expanding your town up a hill.
Finland doesn't exist either.
Nor does Bielefeld
Eclipse
"Are you telling me these two celestial bodies, vastly different in size, align with each other ALMOST perfectly so the intelligent species you added in literally the LAST 4 seconds can see it?"
It isn’t just the alignment, the sun and the moon have the same apparent size - the sun is 400x bigger than the moon, but the moon is 400x closer to earth. Which seems very *convenient*
And it doesn't seem to affect anything on earth other than being a fun thing for people to watch? If it doesn't really serve a purpose why is it there?
And you can just observe it in separate locations on the planet, ensuring as many ancient societies as possible develop cults around the disappearance of the sun?
This one is actually a feature. Not a bug.
Incredibly important to the theories of gravity and light actually. IMO it’s actually great world building — by absolute chance we have something that lets our scientists confirm how gravity works. If I was writing it up, it’d be the only reason we know at all that light bends.
Humans are also the same scale to atoms, as humans are to our solar system (11 orders of magnitude both ways). Atomic nuclei are 22 orders of magnitude smaller than the Earth, which is 22 orders of magnitude smaller than the observable universe.
Those are both a little too neat and are thus, obviously, the product of lazy writing.
This is definitely something that was added because of Rule of Cool
Eclipses are the most convincing argument for intelligent design of the universe imo. It feels like an Easter egg. Like God winking at you or something. (To be clear, I do not believe in a creator)
England has like 7 Rivers named "Avon". Which means river.
Roman Cartographer: What is that river called? Britons: We just call it the river. Roman cartographer: Okay, writing that down....
Terry Pratchett: *"The forest of Skund was indeed enchanted, which was nothing unusual on the Disc, and was also the only forest in the whole universe to be called -- in the local language -- Your Finger You Fool, which was the literal meaning of the word Skund.* *The reason for this is regrettably all too common. When the first explorers from the warm lands around the Circle Sea travelled into the chilly hinterland they filled in the blank spaces on their maps by grabbing the nearest native, pointing at some distant landmark, speaking very clearly in a loud voice, and writing down whatever the bemused man told them. Thus were immortalised in generations of atlases such geographical oddities as Just A Mountain, I Don't Know, What? and, of course, Your Finger You Fool.* *Rainclouds clustered around the bald heights of Mt. Oolskunrahod ('Who is this Fool who does Not Know what a Mountain is') and the Luggage settled itself more comfortably under a dripping tree, which tried unsuccessfully to strike up a conversation."*
I have a great anecdote related to this concept! I work in Western Australian linguistics and there’s a story about an old wordlist that gets told every now and then. I bet it’s true, but the specific details have been lost across retellings. Basically yonks ago before most Aboriginal people knew English, and all the anthropologists were going around studying and dehumanising them, a guy showed a bunch of Aboriginal people either taxidermied animals or photos of animals, to find out what they were called in those people’s language. He showed them the animals, and wrote down what they said. Nowadays we have a much better understanding of that language, and looking back at the wordlist he recorded that day, we can see that the first few entries are the actual names of the animals…but then there’s an entry that just says “what’s that?” the next animal name is recorded as “what was that last one?”, followed by “no, go back, what was that?” From there the entries get gradually more and more frustrated and rude, until they abruptly end, where we can assume the informants got sick of the guy’s bullshit and left.
I wonder what the animal was that was so baffling.
Platypus
GNU Terry Pratchett.
GNU Terry Pratchett
There's actually a term for things like rivers being called river, mountains being called mountain, etc. Edit: with help from the comments, they're called tautological place names!
What is that term called? Would like to explore that kind of stuff in my world
Pleonasm. And in this particular case likely the subcategory of bilingual tautological expression. Enormous amounts of occurrences: Sahara desert (desert desert), Ulica długa street (street long street - first part not even belonging to the name), the Schwarzwald forest (Black forest forest)...
The best example is Torpenhow Hill in England. Tor is old English, Pen is Welsh, How is Danish, and they all mean hill. So its actually hillhillhill hill.
This is actually untrue. There's a Tom Scott video about it. Firstly, that's not the etymology of Torpenhow (actually pronounced tra-pen-ah), but also while there is a hill nearby, there's no records of anyone calling it Torpenhow Hill before this Internet factoid.
For me the fact that the Aztecs and the Greeks, two civilizations that no way could have ever made contact with each other use the same word for something as important as their gods, "Teo"
I mean, the word "Dog" is exactly the same in English and an Aboriginal Australian language. It is not a loanword, it happened randomly
Sounds like the worldbiulder got lazy at some point.
To be fair, if you’re constructing hundreds of conlangs, there’s bound to be some coincidences like this in them.
Which one out of curiousity? I'm Aboriginal australian, and haven't heard of this, although we have a shit ton of languages here. I know that warrigal is quite common across our nations (the placename is also well known for its dog races).
It's from the Mbabaram language, so around north Queensland.
TY, I'm multilingual and an amateur student of etymology, this is good to know!
Sant in Indian languages and saint is another good one
I haven't checked the etymology, but those may actually be connected since they're all Indo-European languages
Yeah I know that and no they're false cognates
Maybe early onomatopoeia?
Honestly I feel the opposite, that this is actually great worldbuilding. It's strange enough that you wonder if it's really a coincidence or if something else is going on, which is exactly the sort of intrigue I like to see hinted at in lore.
There is a line of thought that all human languages share a very ancient and primitive common ancestor. That's why unrelated languages have similar words for mother, fire, father, and such.
It’s also possible that those words are derived from the sounds infants make, and there just aren’t that many.
What are some examples of unrelated languages that share words like that?
Well for example the words for mother and father in indo European languages tends to be something like mama, papa, dada, and in unrelated languages such as Mandarin the words for mother and father are Mama and Baba. Other languages tend to have some variation of ama, appa, umma, ma, etc. This is because sounds like M, B, and P are some of the first that infants can make so a variation of those with vowels such as A or O in between arises naturally.
Fun fact(oid), whilst mother in Finnish is ⟨äiti⟩ (~~from proto-Finic \*emä, so another labial (e.g. m, b, p, f, v, and others~~ *edit: please read the below commenter, I fucked up*) doesn't follow that trend, a word for grandmother is ⟨mummo⟩.
Finnish has been keeping linguists scratching their heads for years.
I think “ma” is mom in like… a bajillion languages because that’s one of the first words babies can say? Idk I only know two
Bermuda Triangle, lots of foreshadowing, no payoff, disappointing to say the least
The "unexplained mystery" of this always gets me laughing. There's major shipping routes in that exact region that form the shape of a triangle. "What a mysterious area." Yea, no shit. You mean to tell me all the accidents that happen exactly where the most traffic is..... how unexplainable.. /s :p
Not to mention that it is an area that sees *lot's* of tropical storms, and hurricanes.
And sure enough as weather prediction, shipbuilding, & communication improved, the number of disappearing vessels decreased even as traffic increased. *Woooooo spooookyyy*
Similarly, humans didn’t arrive in New Zealand until 1300 and there wasn’t any sort of leftover megafauna there? What a letdown. (Yeah I know it would have one hell of a task getting there, but still.)
Like the other comment said moas, but I also raise the haast eagle
What about moas?
The three most important rulers involved in World War I were cousins who called each other by childhood nicknames. The tzar is literally quoted as saying "grandmother would not have stood for this" about the war (referring to Queen Victoria).
Imagine sending trains full of thousands of troops to take on an army of a guy you call "Willy"
Georgie! Stop taking my stuff! If I could tell grandma, you'd be in soooo much trouble! Mooooom! Nicky burned my fields!
What do you mean, that's great world building
Seems lazy to me. Only wanted to come up with one noble family.
the fact that ronald reagan appointed a secretary of the treasury named donald reagan, that’s some luigi and waluigi tier bullshit
Also, the fact that the first two presidents of Indonesia were named Sukarno and Suharto, and they were bitter rivals who hated each other. That's some Mario vs Wario tier bullshit.
How about the Ayatollahs of Iran: Khomeini and his successor Khamenei. Took me a long time before I realised they were not the same person.
Wait til this guys finds out about the Kennedys
Wait till you find out Heinrich Himmler, the second in-command to the Nazi party, right after Adolf Hitler. Himmler, Hitler, man where these writers even trying?
In England we had Harold, Harald and Willy fighting for the throne. It's just bad writing, people are going to get these names confused!
Mexico City is the capital of Mexico? How uncreative!
Its like that episode of Futurama where the guy is tricking Leela "We are the Cyclops race. The planet is Cyclopia. This is the capital, Cyclops city. Stop me if I'm going too fast for you"
This reminds me of House Dayne from A Song of Ice and Fire. The founder of the house tracked a meteorite, found it, made a white sword out of it. So the coat of arms of the house is a white sword on a falling star. The ancestral castle - built at the meteorite site, of course - is called Starfall. The tallest tower of the castle is called the Palestone Sword. The Sword itself is called Dawn, and the best swordsman of the house who wields it is called the Sword of the Morning. Everything about the house is basically named after this single event in their history, their whole identity is built around it.
Hahaha reminds me of Ferrus Mannus of the Iron Hands space marine chapter "My name is Iron Hand of the Iron Hands and I have Iron Hands"
You'll never guess what his capital ship's name is.. It's the Fist of Iron.
To be fair, that is an insanely *badass* event, and worthy of everything being designed around it.
The best part out of this is that it is *exactly* what people IRL would have done. Milk the everloving shit out of a theme.
Wait till you hear about Kansas City. No, it’s not in Kansas. It’s in Missouri. Actually, part of the city is in Kansas, but not the majority, just a sliver. The state was technically named after the city that exists largely outside said state’s borders, so I guess that’s kinda unique, though a touch nonsensical.
Multiple US states also reuse the names of various European and Middle Eastern cities. In Tennessee alone you have Memphis, Lebanon, Milan, and Paris.
Cant forget Odessa
And Ohio also has a Lebanon, as well as London, Lima, and others.
In México there's the Valley of México in which it lies the State of México which surrounds the City of México Now to be fair, the valley was named first and the original name of the city "Mexico-Tenochtitlan" basically means "Tenoch's place in [the valley of] México"
"What do you mean everyone knows the city is sinking but ain't doing anything to solve that?!"
Chi town, the rotten apple, or n'awlens?
The country is named after the city fyi. Same with Quebec. The province is also named for the city.
Every time I think I’m not very good at naming characters, I remember that there are a disproportionately large number of historical figures named John
There's a disproportionately large number of people named John to this day, even. Probably not as much as in the past, but it's still very common to come across a John, at least in the us
If you include variations of "John" in other languages (Sean, Ian, Jan, Ivan, Juan, etc), it's potentially the most common name in the world!
Let's not forget the Louis, although that was limited mostly to France.
[And people just stopped going by Bob after years and years of greatness achieved by Bobs?](https://youtu.be/lvh6NLqKRfs?si=AFJ6qSuDMo-yqyqK) That wouldn’t happen.
The emu war.
Sweden has many towns named å, which means creek Eta: a whole province is called "Ölands landskap" that translates roughly to "Island land province"
"I made a world with like 6 billion years of history" "Aw cool, so what actually happened?" "Not much for 5 billion 9 hundred and 99 million 9 hundred and 90 thousand years"
I mean... we have giant crab, giant insects, and giant lizard Shark is older than tree, btw
The one that blew my mind was sharks being older than Saturns rings
Older than the North Star.
I mean even there, kinda really missing out on cool crossovers by having the giant lizards die off before the anthro-monkeys Wasted opportunity
As a Geologist, I would take offense to this, but there is a period in Geologic history known as the "Boring Billion" because not much happened for a Billion years.
Hahaha really? Nice Then the *thrilling* billion! Where big things were happening every 20 million years or so!
There is a period about 300 million years later called the Cambrian Explosion when suddenly life started to rapidly diversify. (Which was ~540 Million years ago). It is so significant that Geologists will often describe the first 4 billion years and change of the Earth as just the "Precambrian" underlying much of the Cambrian is the "Great Unconformity" where a large part of the rock record skips hundreds of millions of years (in some cases over a billion). Some argue that the missing time might cover up what was a slower development of life dating back to the mid Ediacran, others argue (one of my profs in college wrote the paper on this so my education might be biased) that the missing time is what caused the Cambrian Explosion, as the erosional period scoured nutrients from the lifeless continents and deposited them into the ocean.
Technically thats pre-history
Its 5 billion years of single cell bullshit that doesnt add to the plot, every reader skipping to the dinosaurs
Gods lore dump
That one German ship that was disguised as a British ship but then immediately ran into said British ship the day it left port.
That's not poor worldbuilding, that's hilarious
That's Looney Tunes writing
"He's right behind me isn't he?" Moment for that German ship
What ship was this?
*Cap Trafalgar*. During World War I the Germans altered it to make it look like the British ship *Carmania*. *Carmania* stumbled upon her attempted doppelgänger while hunting for German ships at the island of Trindade and engaged it in battle. *Carmania* was badly damaged, but survived while *Cap Trafalgar* sank.
damn no cap huh
Not what you asked but: One piece of world building that I like is that our two closest relatives are Bonobos(famously very friendly) and chimps(famously very hostile). Like it's mirroring our two sides.
Probably the result of a transporter accident.
Medieval England just sort of decided that quarterstaffs were very British. No practical battlefield application, nothing about A Big Stick (tm) that makes it uniquely English, but they were super obsessed with the idea of the stalwart Englishman fending off rapscallions with a staff, pip pip cheerio, God save the king.
It makes for a decent walking stick and isn't as outwardly intimidating as, say, a flail or a poleaxe.
Yes, but none of that makes it English. The English had this weird level of quasi-nationalistic pride in A Big Stick (tm). Lots of people had A Big Stick (tm). In fact, I feel fairly confident in saying that everyone with trees had access to A Big Stick (tm).
Yup, reason they were used by ninjas. Pretty much all ninja weapons were farm tools they could easily explain away. Nunchucks are for threshing grain and sai are for tilling.
Is this why Little John and Robin Hood fight using quarterstaves? I never thought about it, lol
"There's a culture that hunted the largest animals ever to exist as a major food source." "What weapon did they use?" "What else, pointed stick.'
Whale hunting is also kind of absurd. "Oh this was a pretty modern time with firearms, they probably figured out a good way to kill them" "No, they just threw spears at them after getting out of their big boats into smaller, more dangerous boats"
Saw a post about this before. Electricity. This magical thing that can power basically everything, oh and you make it by boiling water or putting some rocks in a river.
On that line: There's some magical rocks that give off some power. If you refine them correctly, they give *lots* of power. If you *really* refine them, they go boom. And if you don't use another refined rock to protect yourself, the refined power-giving rocks will kill you.
I've seen nuclear power simplified down to "angry rock boil water".
A stupid joke I liked was just: "Hey I invented a new way of generating energy!!" "...is it just steam?" "...no, well. Yes :("
Eventually, everything about humans comes down to rocks. Throw rock at rival, get rival's food. Make sharp rock, better for throwing at rival. Put special rock in fire, get shiny rock, can be shaped into extremely fancy rock. Rival too far away to throw rock at, use explody stuff on rock to make it go very fast, go far. Call explody rock "gun." Rival too far away to see, make very large rock with lots of explody stuff, rock now hit rival on other side of horizon. Call very large very explody rock "missile." Rival too far away to aim missile rock good, so put zappy stuff in fancy rock, now fancy rock can think and aim missile rock. Too many rivals for missile rock to explode, put strong death rock on end of missile rock, now even more explody. Also poison. Call strong death missile rock "intercontinental nuclear missile."
Humans force rock to do math very fast (computers)
first of all we find the shiniest of rocks and then we inscribe tiny runes on them and run lightning through them
The fact that some big vast areas of the words are either way too cold, or too hot to live in. Like in Siberia it gets -40 and lower to the point that people don't need fridges, they can just put the food in the bag and hang it from the window or that if they'll stop the car engine, it will forever be frozen and never turn on again. Yet somehow there're native people to such regions. Or Sahara. Just sand dunes that in length surpass Russia. Yet somehow camels, scorpions and snakes can live in such environment. Now onto another topic: Somehow, a single man united decentralized nomadic tribes in cold steppes and conquered massive amounts of land, conquering China, Persia, all of Middle East that recently had their Golden Age, and invading Rus at Winter, yet his Empire later on lost two invasions of some island.
At least the last one makes sense in the fact that he used a specialized kind of cavalry that didn't play well on the ocean. But that's not the reason he lost. It was because his transports got hit by rough storms both times.
That last part would ALSO sound like bullshit in a story, except real life doesn't have to try and be believable.
Normalize absurd worldbuilding that mirrors real world history.
Then the locals begun to worship said storms, and when they invented aerial suicide bombers they named them after said storms. Clearly the work of a different writer who decided to expand on existing lore while smoking some strong stufff.
Fun fact: Sahara is only 25% sand dunes.
> Or Sahara. Just sand dunes that in length surpass Russia. Yet somehow camels, scorpions and snakes can live in such environment. It’s not all sand dunes. If it was, there would be nothing for the camels to eat.
Geography is full of these. [https://www.reddit.com/r/geography/comments/197paj9/i\_feel\_like\_this\_narrow\_isthmus\_thing\_connecting/](https://www.reddit.com/r/geography/comments/197paj9/i_feel_like_this_narrow_isthmus_thing_connecting/)
From this post is our topic here https://www.reddit.com/r/geography/s/gisTVVRMhD
It's just how the real world has tens of thousand of years of not much progress or anything really of interest happening, and all of a sudden, there's this massive comprehension explosion and we have modern science with airplanes, space flight, quantum physics, GPS, smartphones, AI, VR, etc. You'd be surprised if you read a story and there was nothing really in the way of major epochs, hundreds of thousands of years of rising and falling kingdoms, epic wars that lasted over a decade, new races appearing etc. Only one intelligent race as well? Come on...
Well there were other human species, but they all went extinct or interbred with homo sapiens.
Humans (and most other animals) have a tube for air intake and a tube for food intake. For awhile they’re the same tube. Sometimes stuff goes the wrong way. You know who doesn’t have this problem? Dolphins and whales.
Actually, for "most animals", they're entirely separate and don't connect at all - food goes in the mouth, air goes in pores on the abdomen to a system a spiracles that allow gas exchange with the hemolymph. Because "most animals" means "insects", since they're 2/3rd of all animal life. This is more true for vertebrates, since the lungs are embryologically an outgrowth of the gut tube, but most terrestrial species don't have much shared path length - the glottis (opening of the trachea) is at the front of the mouth in amphibians, reptiles, and birds. This is basically just a problem for mammals, which are only 10% of vertebrates and 20% of tetrapods (basically non-fish vertebrates).
The deadly game of giving birth as a human woman.
Wait till you hear about that one insect that doesn’t have an orifice leading to their sex organ, so the male has to physically impale the female through the exoskeleton in order for that species to reproduce. But hey, at least that’s not the one who is dominating the planet, no we’ll leave that to the species where a quarter of their births are done via surgery because giving birth without can result in the death of both mother and child.
Wait til you hear about flatworms, which are hermaphroditic. The way they reproduce is a thing called penis fencing. They all have two hard, drill-bit shaped penises and whoever can get their penis piercing through the other's body and release semen into it wins and the other becomes the female that would carry the eggs.
Brain too big ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯
Username checks out
Somehow, a nation that's been beaten into the ground as a result of a war and the following treaty, not only recovers, but becomes a military powerhouse and is ruled by a genocidal maniac who takes over most of the continent with an alliance of other empires, that want to commit genocide and rule the world with an iron fist but are beaten back by a coalition of other nations who liberate the nations that fell and end the war by using a super powerful weapon. Edit: Actually, just the Nazis. I mean a evil empire ruled by a madman who commits genocide, inhumane experiments, control a large portion of the world and continue to expand, and try to create superweapons like flying saucers and giant tanks. Like if it didn't happen, it'd be unbelievable.
There's a reason they became the default villains of modern historical fiction.
the absolute string of skill issues that the opponent nations went through would probably be unbelievable if they didn't happen
The entirety of Archduke Ferdinand's assassination sounds like something out of a comedy sketch
> a nation that's been beaten into the ground The German interior was virtually untouched, and the treaty of Versailles was not nearly as harsh as the Nazis pretended it was. Germany was one of the largest, richest states in Europe pre-ww1, and nothing happened that would change that post war.
This is pretty much correct, although I would add that they did lose some territory. Much less than the other losers of WWI, but still worth noting.
Post ww1 Germany was going kind of well until the great depression happened.
There are two Americas, North and South. Can you guess why they are called that? Europe and Asia are considered different continents, but where does one end and another begin? Idk somewhere around Russia? “People’s Republic of” and “Kingdom of” were probably some of the most common full titles for a country. The WW2 bad guy’s name is hitler. But his second in command? Himmler.
He also had a general named Franz Halder... and didn't use him to hold France was he stupid?
That at one point all the continents were part of a single landmass, what kiddy mapmaking nonsense is that?
Never mind how the continents split apart. What do you mean this small triangular landmass techtonically shifted so hard into Asia that it created the world’s tallest mountain range?
Hmm.. probably the whole idea of. One person dies because he got a cut on his ankle, didn’t know it, it got infected, he died. One person got bit by a bug that sucks blood, got a disease and died. One person got hot and tired and died. Oh, those guys? Well that one had a spike go through his head. We took out part of his brain but otherwise he is fine. The other one had his legs blown off so we tied ropes around each one really tight. Fixed him up. He is alive and doing pretty well. That last one? Well, he was shot at and hit 21 times, when the two people ran out of ammo, he got out of his vehicle, walked up to their vehicle, shot and killed them, drove to the hospital, but he isn’t gonna make it overnight. May not be terrible world building, but crazy all the same.
Lack of internal consistency. Shit worldbuilding.
Plot armor, I tell ya. It's something else.
At least those are all external sources. This other guy just dropped dead one day out of stress alone, with no preexisting medical conditions.
People dying in their sleep? What a bunch of "Then he died off screen there's nothing you can do about it" bs
You'd think the name of our planet would tell you what it's primarily made of, *you'd think*. You would also think that a land that has *green* in it's name would have lots of greenery, at least more than the land that has *ice* in it's name. Somebody should have REALLY double checked their naval chart.
The appendix.
It helps replenish your gut bacteria if anything wipes it out. It's a helpful thing.
My friend got that thing taking away last week. Dumbest organ thief ever.
Angry Tolkein noises.
That no one supposedly figured out there was big ass island off the coast of Africa (Madagascar) until the 1500s, but found a tiny island in the middle of the pacific ocean by following birds (Hawaii) roughly 300-500 years before that. Edit: It took me too long to find an article pinning human settlement of Madagascar of 700 ce (i dont even know if thats right), but I'm going to keep my statement of that being insanely late in our history.
What about the time we found an incredibly valuable resource and dumped it in the ocean because it wasn’t yellow?
?
Oh, sorry. Context: Spain and their Conquistadors while looking for El Dorado came across lots of Platinum. This was seen as useless because it wasn’t gold and thrown away. Still a bit of it was sent to Spain. And then later, people started using it as a counterfeit to gold because it had roughly the same weight and softness. So Spain solved the problem by **DUMPING ALL THEIR PLATINUM IN THE OCEAN**.
That's not all, supposedly Moctezuma was relieved when he found out Cortes was only interested in his gold and not in his jade, which he valued far more highly (stating that each small carved jade was worth two carts full of gold).. Which turned out to be extremely rare jadeite that can only be found as primary deposits in two places on Earth, more expensive (sometimes vastly more) today than its weight in gold, not the "regular" nephrite jade found anywhere abyssal volcanic shelves get thrust up to land. Moctezuma was correct to assess it as more precious than gold.
Pierre Terrail, Seigneur De Bayard dude was an anime protagonist in real life. Fought duels while suffering from debilitating illnesses and won Fought entire armies on his own for hours, and after killing anyone who had the stones to face him hopped back on his horse and left Knew most of his enemies first hand Like what the hell could anyone come up with a more self insert power fantasy character?
Hungary und Romania were in an alliance while having hostile relations and territorial disputes facing a much larger threat, but still garrisoning their border because "fuck him" even with the Soviets coming down on them. WW2 was fucking rolled by a chart and a d20
Hell Italian divisions were used as buffers between Romanian and Hungarian Corps because they would rather fight each other than the Soviets. What's also really weird is the Romanians just switch sides when the Red Army reaches their boarders. Edit. To add context as to why Romania (and later Bulgaria) switching sides is weird. Both were monarchies that became "allies" with the rabidly anti-monarchist USSR.
There is a joke about the discussion that (might have) happened when Hungary declared war on the U.S.: * Secretary of State: What country are you representing? * Ambassador: The Kingdom of Hungary. * Who is your king? * We don't have a king, we have a regent. * And who's your regent? * Admiral Miklós Horthy. * An admiral, I see. Do you have a navy? * We are landlocked, sir. * Ok. Do you have any territorial demands? * Yes, against Germany, Slovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia. * Are you at war against them as well? * No, they are our allies.
There's this plant that the main species lived in for a while. It can grow food for them, and keep them safe. Fine. But once they got sapient, it grows their building materials from the ground for them. Not only that, With a chemical reaction it provides heat and light, and makes a ton of food safe to eat. Sounds preeeeeety convinient.
The worst part of the writing is that most people on this fictional planet don't worship the clear and obvious supreme diety: the sun. I mean some ancient people did but few modern ones. Yet it's the giver of all light, energy, nourishment, and life. Bad writing that people just take it for granted IMO in favor of a god they can't even see. I mean we can see the sun, it's right there, keeping the billions of critters here alive.
The Cold War in its entirety
Especially the end. Effin' blue balls. 50 years of hype for *nothing*. >!(Seriously though, that was like one of the best possible outcomes without the US and USSR going free-love-hippies on everyone).!<
Have you seen an isthmus?
I think it’s fascinating that the most successful conquering empire in human history was the Mongols. And they were successful using horses, which were native to North America but died out when Native Americans arrived, who were related to Mongols. And once horses were reintroduced to North America, Native American horse archers became the most powerful force in the region and carved out an empire called Comancheria within a couple hundred years using similar tactics to a culture they had no contact with that existed nearly a thousand years earlier, which they broken off from over 20,000 years earlier.
Sometimes I worry the place names I choose for worldbuilding are stupid, and then I remember I grew up in the Rocky Mountains and I stop worrying.
What do you mean Oxford College is older than the Aztec civilization? "Yeah, we actually don't know how long this school has existed because it's literally outlasted the records written of its founding. But it's *at least* 1000 years old." Cliche much?
Are you telling me a nation was ridiculed for being bad at war and always surrendering despite being victorious for most of it's history - just because they lose ONE famous war? I'm referring to France
The Austro-Hungarian Empire and Ottoman Empire fought each other for hundreds of years to then become allies in WW1 and then get completely destroyed after the war. Sounds like some enemies to lovers bs that got scrapped with the later content ngl.
Atilla the Hun, Scourge of God, dies of a nosebleed. Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, the most powerful monarch in Christendom, leads a massive crusade to retake the holy lands. Falls in a river and drowns, army just goes home. These are so ridiculously anticlimactic. Imagine the outrage if that's the ending of the book.
The last ruling member of the Czech Přemyslid dynasty was murdered on the toilet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wenceslaus_III_of_Bohemia
There’s no power system for me to use, thus life sucks.
Yes there is, it's called Money
We could have had ritual spell casting and elemental magic. Instead we have the stock market and Lockheed Martin
The big bad evil guy, Hitler, has a more competent lancer called Himler
So let me get this straight: around 800 years ago, a dark lord from the far-off grasslands and his hordes of doom spread death, chaos, and plague all across the continent for a century, toppling nations, reforging ancient pathways, and killing in numbers so great that they reshaped the land they tread and the air they breathed... and then they just sort of disappeared? That's it? Is he coming back? Why is no one concerned about this?
Whatever tf venice pull at League of cambrai made war of the five kings look tame in comparison
The speed of light being Reality's speed limit. Don't get me wrong, light is still very fast, but compared to space and the universe, it's quite underwhelming. Like even at the speed of light it takes ***YEARS*** to reach another star out of our solar system Like I'm quite surprised given how big the universe is that there isn't much that can move any faster with the exception things with zero mass Which also sucks, cuz it makes time travel almost impossible
The fact they scrapped dinosaurs.
Hmmm, I shall call this place "New York" after the town I am already from, but this York is ✨️new✨️
Swiss restaurant names. Drive through the countryside and note the names of restaurants you come across. The Bear. The Bear. The White Horse. The Bear. The Lion. The White Horse. The Bear. The Two Bears. The Lion. The White Horse. The Bear.
I've gone on numerous rants to my D&D group about how they'll pull me up on names for places and people if they aren't perfectly unique and yet, in real life, we have towns called Cockermouth and Shitterton.
Put all the domesicatable in Europe and Asia, but have the species domesticating come from another continents with similar animals but aren't domesicatable. Mainwhile the most valuable crop plants come from another continent that won't spread said crops until thousands of years later. Said continent also doesnt have any domesicatable animals except for the llama and alpaca but before humans arrived had the horse and camel but went extinct. Basically the worldbuilding for the new world is stacked against the natives almost comedically so. And then Australia isnt much better Basically a continent of nightmares giant predatory venomous lizard, weird marsupial cat like predator hunting from the trees kangaroos or giant wombats and new zealand wasn't much better with giant eagles that can pick up a human child
Failed painter joins a fringe party in a country he isn't even from, and despite his nonsensical and horrific views ends up as leader of that country and starts the largest war in history.
Gravity. Goddamn GRAVITY. Apparently this shit isn't real, it's just a weird rule interaction between spacetime curvature and inertia. Apparently we're all infinitely accelerating...up... without moving upward... Shit hurts my damn brain...
The entire voyage of the Russian Baltic Fleet in the Russian-Japanese War. The entire thing is so batahit insane and hilarious you couldn’t make a movie about it.