Across the worlds of speculative fiction, authors have imagined a near-infinite spectrum of sentient beings with unique insular traditions and artistic taste. These cultures will often be devised from scratch, but it’s a lot easier to pull from existing examples. It’s one thing to use the work of other artists, but many simply create a Fantasy Counterpart Culture of a real-world group of people.
The real cultures thatappear throughout humanity are complex and engaging. Many of them have millennia of historical context and evolution, shaping everything from family structure to architecture. Coming up with all of that stuff for a fictional culture would be hard, so why not let history do all the work?
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Fantasy Counterpart Cultures are fictional civilizations that closely mirror real-world traditions. The inspiration is usually non-diegetic. This group of aliens or elves or whatever just happens to live in a place that looksexactly like Victorian London, Feudal Japan, or Ancient Greece. Some examples exist to satirize or poke fun at the traditions of that culture. Others exist just because someone thought it looked cool, so they borrowed what they liked and left behind what they didn’t. Frequent examples include every evil empire closely resembling the Romans or the Nazis, every spooky location looking like Transylvania or a location out of a Kurosawa film on another planet. The obvious upside of this trope is that it fleshes out an otherwise blank slate and allows an audience a level of familiarity. The obvious downside is that boiling down the traditions of real people can swiftly turn into appropriation or outright bigotry.
Most of the big beloved fantasy writers of the last few centuries love this trope. J. R. R. Tolkien didn’t use Fantasy Counterpart Cultures all the time, but he did baseThe Shire on anidealized version of the English countryside. His Rohirrim took a lot from the Gothic culture from the Black Sea region of Central Europe and the Anglo-Saxons whose language inspired theirs. Terry Pratchett’sDiscworldfranchise pulled heavily from existing cultures to create every society on the Disc. The franchise has lands based on Asia, Eastern Europe, England, New York, Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, and so on. Pratchett did this deliberately, using the traits of real cultures to point out absurdities in their structure. The bestexample remains Ankh-Morpork, which perfectly captures the inconsistencies in English and American city life.
From the opposite angle, George R. R. Martin’sA Song of Ice and Fireloosely adapts a real culture to just aboutevery civilization in Westeros. The Dothraki are assembled from Native Americans, Huns, and Mongols, with a healthy amount of negative horse barbarian stereotypes thrown in. The Free Cities are reminiscent of medieval Italy’s city-state period. Qarth is a fairly naked clone of Constantinople. The North is reminiscent of Scotland, especially the mountain clans who are very similar to the Scottish Highland people. Many examples combine multiple cultures to create something a bit more unique, but the inspirations are usually clear. Martin has made it clear that the unnamed planet that holds Westeros is actually an alternate version of Earth, so that may explain why so many elements are similar.
Another work that abuses Fantasy Counterpart Culturesis theWarhammerfranchise. There isn’t a major faction or race that isn’t mostly cribbed from history. They’ve got two or three takes on Vikings, multiple versions of Native Americans, and too many Nazi-inspired elements to count. Chapters of the Imperial Army are clearly sci-fi takes on real cultures, some of which are better handled than others. The Orcs, the only fun race, are clearly inspired by British football hooliganism. They’ve even got a place called Sylvania, which is unshockingly based on Transylvania and lousy with vampires. The apparent go-to method of creating anewWarhammerfaction isgrabbing a random culture from history and throwing a bunch of sci-fi weaponry into their stereotypes.
There’s no shame in borrowing a little bit from existing material to make a fictional culture. Just about every work with a wide variety of species and factions pulls one or two straight out of the world history textbook. Star Wars, Marvel,Warcraft, DC,Fire Emblem,Elder Scrolls, and justabout every other big franchise have plenty of Fantasy Counterpart Cultures. Arguably, there have been so many cultures in the history of the world that it’s almost impossible to come up with traditions that bear no resemblance to any of them. That shouldn’t give an author carte blanche to make a mockery of real peoples' identities, but it allows them to play with concepts in that realm. A fictional culture rarely has the intense history of a real one, so borrowing that level of importance makes it a bit more powerful. Fantasy Counterpart Cultures can be monuments to their inspiration, but they can also seem lazy. It’s all about how the culture makes the leap from reality to fantasy.
