CAMPFIRE ➤ bit.ly/TF_Mobile Campfire’s such a fabulous, accommodating tool. Honestly, if you’re intimidated by writing and worldbuilding, it’s just a relief to have something like this that breaks it all down and makes it super simple for you! Go give it a try!
Could you do a video on how to write a action story without it being "dumb." Like a action story with actual plot, character development, and doesn't slow down to a crawl to just tell a story. Thank you.
I agree about those massive striders in Morrowind. When I first saw them when I was little was awe inspiring. They were just the fast travel creatures but I had so many ideas about what they were and how they came to do the job they do.
A recurring theme in the monsterverse is that creatures like Godzilla, King Kong, Mothra and Rodan ruled the earth before humans did and if we aren't careful, these titans will take their world back by force.
yeah , it's like the ice ages , we are currently living in the glacial minimum , a period between ice ages , all of human civilization does , and well godzilla is the same : they merely whent in slumber while chemically powered creatures like us did their hown things , they are ready to come back up again and treat the whole world with it's concrete buildings , it's steel bridges like papermachet
@@davidegaruti2582 I always loved the concept of “mankind tries to solve an environmental problem and the solution creates a new problem. Like in Stray where they made a bacteria to eat the litter humanity has made, the Bacteria rapidly grows and mutates and becomes a nearly world ending disaster that nonetheless resulted in humanity dying. Then theirs the classic “solve global warming and accidentally create an Ice Age” mankind in its hubris looked for ways to clean up its mess with the destructive efficiency in which the mess itself was created.
Depending on the situation, I kind of like feeling small. It feels safer sometimes, when you're a little kid, everything is big, the people who protect you, are big. The walls around you that protect you from harsh weather and temperature are big, and I just wanna be a small creature hiding peacefully with the larger things around me.
The feeling you get when you're around the gentle giants, like blue whales and whale sharks. I kinda think that we are lacking in stories that explore what it is like to be protected by something bigger and stronger.
One thing I love about giant monsters is that even though you can see what they’re like on the outside, you can never quite tell what they’re like on the inside. Do they have human emotions like us? Do they behave more like a dog or a lion? Or do they simply hide their personalities altogether. As someone who has written a lot of monster characters, mostly dragons, it is something I think about a lot.
You made me think about another thing. Isn't it funny that we ask ourselves those questions *only* when we see a big creature? I mean,, I fear bugs, but they are small, I could k1ll them easily, I don't ask myself those questions, but I do when I'm before an animal bigger than myself.
I have a world where I explore some of these things. At a time long in the past the humans and dragons cooperated with each other and the other sentient races. But that all fell apart, and now the dragons squabble among themselves while aggressively keeping anyone else out of their territories. In steps my protagonist, a girl with more ambition than sense. What will happen?
I like how varied dragons are in this respect. You have giant lumbering beasts, tiny little rats, dragons that are akin to dogs/cats/horses, dragons that are sapient and can either speak English to you or speak through telepathy, and dragons that are so much smarter and experienced than humans that they just don't care about us and would rather we weren't taking coins from their gold pile. Dragons are easily the most flexible creatures, they've been used everywhere in history in so many different ways.
These concepts directly relate to the worldbuilding concept I've been working on as an experiment with scale! I'm trying to make a world where the reader gets simultaneously invested in the lives of creatures of wildly different sizes who all exist in the same world, often not even aware of each other's existence. It's so much fun to use perspective as a tool like that to tell such unique stories!
Oh that sounds really cool. I'm imagining like some baby of the big race playing with a ball which is actually the planet of the small race and from their perspective this is like an earthquake or something
@@THExRISER Currently in the early planning stages, but hoping to make it into a low-budget RUclips series eventually. I'll do a lot of worldbuilding with short stories in the meantime, but I haven't yet decided where to upload them.
As someone who has been raised by Giant monsters and robots, watching Ultraman and other hero shows as a child, seeing how the west does kaiju and giants is so interesting.
By the way, sir, I know you knowthis, your voice is super cool and nice to listen to. I love this channel have for years. I hope you never leave permanently. Even if you take long breaks :) hope this week goes well for you and everyon else involved in this channel
Im thinking about how voice can mold into what you and people you want to talk to want them to be - obviously tone and manierisms or something can change and doing it partly subconcious could change the overall feel a lot ...?
I love the way Monster Hunter does this. Ignoring the ludonarrative dissonance of being able to hunt an infinite number of monsters, I really like the way the world presents humans as just another cog in the machine of nature, human machinery and weapons just another attribute like a dragon's fire breath or their powerful claws. If one side throws nature off-balance, the other responds to keep it in check.
My setting named Waori is built on this concept. There are no static cities or towns, everyone lives inside creatures so large that the people inside are able to move through tubes alongside blood vessels. They live in hollow sections near organs, and they create machines that help the biological functions to be more efficient. Basically, the people are to these creatures what the microbes in our body are to us. The merfolk developed suits to be able to swim through the digestive tract of their creatures and keep them clean, some people have machines to help clean the blood, and all of them fight off invaders that would be far too small for the creature to even see. The people within these creatures are a part of them, in a very real way.
Here's a weird thought: an anti-leviathan story. An encounter with creatures much smaller than humans, who encounter us by chance, and through terrifying levels of ingenuity and resourcefulness, gain an upper hand, and now debate whether to harness us for their own ends, or maintain a respectful harmony, as we try to cope with our new reversed place in nature.
OH MY GOD DUDE, i read the leviathan books in school growing up and forgot what they where called and i've been searching for them forever now, thanks!
It’s worth noting that in Wings of Fire, a few dragons are known for keeping humans as pets, with one even building an entire town just to study humans. The main conflict for the first 5 books was started because a human stabbed the dragon who ruled the desert in the tail, and the power grab became a continent-wide war.
I've been obsessing over Wings of Fire lately and was really happy to see it pop up here. The series continues to do really interesting things with the dichotomy in the current state of its world between dragons and humans. The most interesting part to me is how sparingly the "scavengers" _are_ used most of the time, which makes the flashes of them we see feel special and interesting to come from the opposite perspective as your typical fantasy conflicts. The cherry on top for this, to me, is how dragons sometimes accuse each other of "anthropomorphising" the scavengers, since they're seen as insignificant animals like raccoons or something without sapience. And ultimately, the series does bring in elements of the two learning about each other again, and most dragons are horrified at the thought of being violent to humans once they learn how similar they are mentally.
So scavengers ARE humans. I just started reading the first book and i had no idea humans exist in Wings of fire. I was wondering if the creatures they talk about are humans or not. I can't wait to become a fan. I just now got to buy the first book and it looks good so far :D
this video can be very helpful for one of the stories I want to make. it's a fantasy story about a girl who is a giant made by the main villain of the story and a mercenary. Sinopsis: the villain is a immortal human who lived long enought to learn how to bend the rules of the world in a limited way, but enought to change and control living beings, and he made her to be a war machine, but he never got to really finish her, so she (our MC) awakes alone on her birth place, a place who seems almost like a mix of a lab and a mage workshop but completely taken over by nature, with no memories of any past and incapable of speach, but with a enormous size of 50ft tall and a powerful regenerative ability who makes her almost unstopable on conventional combat (yes, you know where the aspiration comes from, but the similarities end here with what comes next). At the same time, there is this young cocky cat boy who, despite being short, is a mercenary who hunts monsters for a living (monsters made by the main villain btw), and one day he goes alone on a hunt for a big monster who is killing and eating other monsters on the area disrupting the guild's business, but he ends up almost being killed, but is saved by a giant girl (our MC) and she kind of "adopts" hin. what I want to do in this story is a wholesome "Cat and owner" dinamic where the reader will never be sure who is the "cat" and who is the "owner", since the girl can't speak and can't really understand hin but stay around because she finds hin "cute", while he is the one who want's to be in charge but can't really order her in any way since she is much bigger than hin, so he slowly learns to be humble and patient while she slowly learns about how to communicate and how the world works, meanwhile there is also the more tense and brutal parts, since the world is in chaos and both of then eventualy has to deal with a lot of conflics comming from each of their sides and origins. there is also way more to it since it's only a side story of the actual big plot I want to make with this villain mentioned as the main character, but I hope one day I get to finish this one first. thank you for anyone who readed this far and I hope anyone here likes the idea and maybe even give sugestions on how to do it :^D
@@spice_maker well, she looks like a regular teenage albino human save for her huge size (50ft tall) and a tore down green colored body suit that grew with her during the experiment. the only thing unnatural that can be seen in her body (aside for the size) is a purple glow where her heart should be. her bones are made of a special tipe of artificial steel who's property is to not only weight less but also make things it is "linked" with to be less effected by gravity (this is a minor way to solve the "fisics problem" her existence causes :^V ) while he is a cat boy with brown skin who can be confused for a short human (5ft 7) if not for his tail who he can use as a extra arm to carry some of his tools and dressed with leather and fur gear, some knifes, a crossbow and tools to make traps. the story takes place mostly in a huge cold forest where the trees can easily reach 100ft tall and has brances and roots "connected" to each other, making it the ideal place for his agility and mobility and for her to hide from civilization.
@@andresmarrero8666 the Immortal villain will also have a lot of focus on bonds since his theme can be resumed to: "building a family that can live for as long as he does". so in a way, the story betwen those two mentioned will be kind of a "experiment" to see how I will build the main plot.
One of my favourite worlds where men and giant beasts live in harmony, is the world of Monster Hunter. Here there are monsters that shoot lazers, are as big as entire countries or can launch themselves in the air and plumet down with the force of a small comet. But the people aren't just surviving, they are thriving. And it doesn't come at the cost of the monster population, judging how there is always another quest. And with Stories, we know that there are entire civilizations that ride on them. It has so many fascinating implications
I remember I made a drawing like that. A nuclear submarine on an ocean planet finds an enormous beast, an eel-like creature with eyes bigger than the entire sub, but outside their view we can see the entire back of the creature was bitten off in one bite, and the leviathan monster is in the background, five eyes on one side of the head all locked onto the tiny sub. After all… …there’s always a bigger fish ;)
There's a game called "The Wandering Village" on Steam which delves into this theme of living in a village on the back of a giant travelling creature called an Onbu. It gives you a choice to live harmoniously and protect the Onbu where the village exists, or to exploit it like a parasite to further improve the lives of the villagers.
For the fighting tension, you can have some groups that can beat the monsters and where some monsters are winning, varying region by region, maybe by climate
Wings of fire does include a human city that possesses dragon killing weaponry, but it’s such an outlier that it’s a pretty big surprise to even the main cast of characters
An example of a giant being I'd like to point out are the Leviathans from Mass Effect (specifically the Leviathan DLC for Mass Effect 3). Massive, cuttlefish like, with telepathic abilities and the capacity to move through space and the deep sea. The mere concept of being able to handle that much of a range of atmospheric pressures is both fascinating and a bit scary to me.
Was NOT expecting WoF to be mentioned, still, after years of having been beyond the target audience, I find those books comforting, just something about them that draws me in like nothing else, and makes me feel nice.
I find the giant monster that you revealed at the end to be very interesting. Have I missed a video where you concluded the ongoing story that you had for this series?
@@giantmastersword no, at the beginning of the tale foundry series I thought that there was something about the robot being in touch with someone outside the Foundry
And interesting example of your last point, where we ourselves are the giant creatures, would be in the borrowers story naturally, but a good version from a video game would be lungfishopolis in psychonauts. In that part of the game you're confronted with the idea that big scary animals are more afraid of you than you are of them. And thus in the mental world of the giant lungfish monster you encounter, you appear as a kaiju. And the whole point of the game is to interact with the mental defenses of the world, which are interpreted as a military force. It turns out that the giant lungfish is being controlled by the main villain who is spreading propaganda about you and mobilizing the military against you. It's a way of showing what a significant threat to the villains plans you are. At the very end you fight a psychic projection of the villain in the lung fish's brain in a battle inspired by tokusatsu films like Ultraman
Another incredible example of this is Hayao Miyazaki's Princess Mononoke. The question of mere coexistence or competition adds a constant and engaging tension.
I'm personally using the "giant primordial monster" troupe In the way the SCP universe mostly uses it's elder gods. Where although they are barely mentioned , their existence has ripple effects throughout the whole story and is used to explain what is usually just assumed to be "normal" in fantasy or sci-fi settings.
XC1 gave us the biggest boys. mechonis and bionis are so big that you basically fight with their equivalent of white blood cells at some point X"D and so far I like it a bit more than XB2 (but maybe XB2 feels just small now, just after epic ending of XB1)
In the first Godzilla movies, the *_kaiju_* were simply giant predators, terrifying creatures which were a great danger to humanity. Over time, a strange mythology developed in which some *_kaiju_* were "good monsters", particularly friends to children, defending humanity from the "bad monsters". I can so easily see a mythology like that developing in a world in which *_kaiju_* exist, with refugee children interpreting the movements and behavior of *_kaiju_* as they happen not to step on the ruined house in which they are sheltering, or to turn their stream of fire aside just before it would have incinerated a column of refugees, when in truth it was just a random turn of events in the course of a battle with another territorial *_kaiju_* or a search for food. Children living in shelters around New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina told one another stories about witnessing battles between bands of angels and devils across the city as a way of interpreting the chaotic landscape they were living in. Even Armageddon was preferable in their minds over the reality of mere chaos.
I always find the presence of giant creatures fascinating. The most interesting concept I read (in my humble opinion) were the Ogre Gods from the comic "Petit" (by Gatignol and Hubert), where those giants are not just the apex predators but also the highest in the social hierarchy, being the kings and nobility who dominate (and eat) humans. There's also a parallel with the french XVIII nobility.
There is an example of almost every possible interaction like this in Stellaris. There are giant beasts in the game, some as large as entire planets, and how they are treated can vastly differ from game to game, empire to empire. They can be murdered indiscriminately, put in a zoo as an attraction, studied for research, used for manual labor, forced into the army as shock troops, bread and used as pets, pacified into coexistence with enough study or by simply being passive by nature, worshiped, or offered tribute in the hopes they don't just eat everyone.
Some of my favorite big monsters are the Titans from Xenoblade 1 and Xenoblade 2. Not only does it invoke a lot of things described in this video, but by having humanity live on giants changes how geography works. And that’s just a really neat angle to look at this from
I always thought that with such creatures the whole balance is changed. Either they remain along certain paths and humanity seek them out, or humanity is forced into a nomadic existence. Shadiversity did a series of videos on how monsters would change a world completely, humanity becoming more militant in the event of monsters like orcs and zombies, while vampires would make humanity more paranoid. Nevermind what dragons do. If there's a bunch of kaiju's mucking about humanity would become more quick moving
Godzilla and Giant Monsters in general have always been a part of my childhood and imagination, this video was so nice in exploring why I love the concept so much. The scale, the sense of awe. The knowledge that we as people aren't as in control as we think. Godzilla especially exemplifies this, a force of nature, of destruction, of revenge against man's nuclear hubris. So many different interpretations in just one character. But I've always loved this one quote from Godzilla 2014, "The arrogance of man is thinking nature is in our control, and not the other way around."
I love your videos a lot, especially ones about concepts like these. So when I saw the video display a picture of Wings of Fire, my little nerd brain LOST IT because time is one of my favorite things of all time. Same thing when you brought up HTTYD! I love both of these series and I'm starting to think this is the concept that links both of them to why I enjoy them! Keep making your videos, I love them so much!
This topic is actually very current for me. I happened to create a world for my homebrew dnd campaing kinda by randomly having to explain things to my players. The world in question was created by divine dragons and by the suffering of their offspring. I like the thought of creation trough suffering, so i had one of the dragons (the mother) be murdered by lesser races. And her rotting corpse gave birth to demons. One of her children buried her by singing the mountains ontop of her, the other cried the oceans in her grief. Inspiration was taken from everywhere on this one.
In the world of Dragonlance there have always been regular size dragons that people ride into battle but then in the later books they get invaded by the three smallest dragons from a reality where they are huge to the point of absurdity and it changes the dynamics of the world they take it over completely and eat all the other dragons and the sheer size of them causes the kender species that had never been capable of fear before to have like a cultural ptsd it was all really interesting stuff and a fun shake up to the setting
Another aspect of the 3 ways tension is created from giant creatures, as highlighted by the How to Train your Dragon example & well as other media like Fang & Spear: the dynamics can shift in the story. You can shift from competition to forming a co-operative bond, that bond or general co-existence can crumble, or humans can let go of a parasitic relationship and allow beasts to co-exist again. It’s a very interesting kind of tension, because depending on the depiction of humans & the giant creatures: it can be volatile & ever changing.
I remember making concept art for a beast, that after decades of slumbering, blended in with the mountains, only to wake up from miners striking the inside of it's nostril... and how there's a giant mechanical city, based off of the legends of that same beast
I did not expect to see Wings of Fire mentioned here! Funnily enough Tui is actually (spoilers for the book series) slowly turning the relationship between humans and dragons to go from one of dragon dominance to one of cooperation
Can honestly say I don't feel fear of big things. When I was younger I bumped into the belly of a shark. I just thought that it was extremely cool as in swam away. To be fair, it wasn't a whale. Even so, I'm more scared of needles than any giant animal.
as someone who is developing a story specifically about giant monsters, this really helped me to see all the different ways i can take the plot, i didn't realise there was so much possiblity for me to build with
Just want to say that this is one of my favourite videos from Tale Foundry so far. The stories, the world-building possibilities & the real world connotations are so well done in this video.
There is really more to Wings of Fire ( WoF ) in that regard, like humans originally ruled the entire world and the dragons just minded their own business, but humans antagonized them for no reason when they weren’t a threat at all, so first they coexisted, then the humans challenged the dragons and the dragons won. Also, at the end of the series, they end up joining forces, and a law is passed in every kingdom that dragons are not to eat humans, because they’re intelligent creatures who have a language. So then they cooperate.
The feeling I can best use to describe my emotions when faced with things that are vastly larger, far more powerful, and infinitely older than I am, is awe. It is what the ancients called "The fear of God." It is seeing just how fleeting, frail, and limited we are compared to the universe.
The Bionis and Mechonis from Xenoblade 1 has to be one of the most impactful ways I've seen colossal creatures implemented in media. You're introduced to them at the very beginning of the game. Two titans at the very beginning of time that came into existence, much like how we consider the Big Bang. From there, they started fighting to the death, swingin their blades at each other, cutting off limbs which would fall to the endless ocean and become entire land masses, until eventually, both titans would catch themselves in a stalemate. Both titans now locked in place, their now-lifeless bodies frozen like statues, whilst new life is born on each titan, and a selfsustaining ecosystem begins anew. Your first reminder of this reality is when you finish a scene where two factions are fighting eachother. Homs; the humans that were born from the Bionis and are more or less the "humans" of the world, and Mechon; the cold, heartless machines that appeared to be on the attack from their source of origin: the Mechonis. As the scene finishes up, the camera zooms out, showing the weird scrappy wasteland the factions are fighting on. We're given these amazing, sweeping shots of all sorts of other environments we've never seen before as the camera takes us on a mysterious journey before finally cutting to show the husks of both titans, and you realise that this war was taking place on the very sword that the Mechonis was weilding, wedged deeply into the Bionis itself, and acting as a bridge between the two worlds. Throughout the game, no matter where you are, so long as you can see the sky, you can see the large looming figure of the Mechonis and it's sword thrust above you, into your homeland when you look up. In the day, it's large, black, lifeless figure leaves you in awe that the origin of the worlds are so clearly evident for you to see. And at night, while the body of the Mechonis is harder to make out, it's eyes still glow an ominous red, as brightly as the stars which sprinkle the clouds. There's SO much more to the game, and even more of these moments and ones equal to them, but I highly encourage people to play the game for themselves to find them out for the first time.
Monster Hunter is a pretty good example of a handful of a handful of the talking points in this video. Ongoing competition being the biggest part. One really nice example of coexistence between man and monster is the Dragonriders of Pern series. Haven't read much of it, but the best I can describe is humans creating inseparable bonds with dragons to combat an extraterrestrial threat.
My idea is that monsters the size of entire countries wander around, and so people need to move their cities in line with the area's specific "traveler season" travelers being those big monsters. Everything gets out of their way, people, animals, plants, everything! But people don't have very mobile cities, so when it's traveler season, everything has to stop, drop what it's doing, and hightail it out of the way. This means that it's easy to prey on cities that need to get out of the way. Why build cities then? Because the world is hostile enough to make division of labor on that level absolutely necessary for even a chance of survival
I greatly appreciate this episode, thank you so much! One of the projects I am working on involves worlds with megafauna in them and how two groups of people interact with those creature. This has been very enlightening
I really like the points brought up in this video. In the modern age of climate crisis we're very quick to look to these monsters we fight as having human qualities, like being treated like we treat rats, reviled and exterminated. It can be a great reflection of some aspects of humanity and it resonates because it is a part of humanity we struggle to reconcile with. But we should also see ourselves reflected in the benevolent giants. The world turtle reflecting meteors is an excellent example of a parallel to humanity after NASA deflected an asteroid. But even on the small everyday scale, we look after pets and rescue animals in danger. To the animals, we're some mystical, impossible-to-understand entity who protects them for reasons they can't understand. Although we do plenty of harm we do plenty of good too, and we should see aspects of ourselves reflected in all manner of powerful creatures.
This channel has served a myriad purposes for me personally. On the one hand its been a constant source of entertainment. And on the other, for an individual who constantly struggles with finding creative outlets for all the random urges and ideas that take over my mind for a couple of weeks, and has no idea how to go about actualizing them you guys provide reassurence that the process is indeed as hard as it feels. Not to mention show us all the unique worlds and stories people have created and analyze them in a way I could only dream of doing. So thanks for all the work you guys do and I'll be sure to try out Campfire. Keep up the good work
2 types of fantasy: 1) Once dragons lived in this land... We can only hope that their wisdom and magic will shine upon us once again... 2) There are too much f*cking dragons!
You include so much thought and references to many of my favorite fantasies. This channel does so much, and I've been an avid fan. It's amazing how far you have come. Tale Foundry, keep making stuff up!
a few videos of this channel is currently very helpful for my English writing assignment I'm now making a variation on the alex kisters world from the mandela catalogue but a few you tale foundry's videos helped a lot with the structure and characters. i am very thankful for this channel and yes I am having fun writing the story(first time in year I had fun writing tbh).
13:00 To be fair, the Avanc's illness was first discovered when the citizens dived down to it and found someone had dug huge trenches around its body, which became infected. They weren't actually the ones who did this.
9:28 one you missed under the competing is when the humans ends up becoming the giant monster to even the playing field which IMO is one of the better ones
Something related to silt striders and skyrim in particular. There are so many "lasts" in skyrim that are so heart wrenchingly sad. The last snow elf, the last dark brotherhood sanctuary, the last silt strider, and finally the last dragonborn. I always imagine my character having a moment while gently petting dusty's carapace listening to her mournful song as if she's calling out for her kin but never gets an answer like she used to. All while the dragonborn is on a quest to kill the only other being in tamriel like them for the sake of people that'll never understand them or even really thank them for what they did on their behalf. Every build and character we make in skyrim has unbelievable depression and i challenge anyone to prove me wrong.
A wonderful example of worldbuilding with gigantic beings is the project "Mystery Flesh Pit National Park" by Trevor Roberts where a sedentary subterranean superorganism is turned into a theme park. It is not for the squeamish, but it is morbidly fascinating to peruse.
I’m glad you showed a clip from Hilda cause I find the Midnight Giant to be one of the most whimsical titans ever. How the giants once dominated the world but as humanity grew and expanded the giants found they couldn’t wander the Earth anymore as they would accidentally step on the human communities causing them to fear and judge the giants as heartless monsters. So they were left with no choice other than to leave the Earth behind in search of a new home except for one who remained behind waiting for to meet with his lover.
A great example of the feeling given by Giant monsters, as well as the world building of a world full of those monsters, is the Mouse Guard book series. Absolutely amazing!
In my family we have a tradition of white water rafting in the spring. When my youngest asked why. I at 1st thought about the fun & excitement. Then I thought about it from her 7 year old view. I realized we do it to feel small again. To face something greater than we will ever be & come out together, even if you spent the whole time in the water.
I feel like the worldbuilding of How to Train Your Dragon is far more interesting in the books because it does show how people ultimately exploit the dragons and said dragons are more blatantly sentient. Almost certianly not the best example but it's a good one.
For better or for worse, there was a good point of view and phrase to this concept in one of the Jurassic World movies where Henry Wu states "...To a canary, a cat is a monster. We are just used to being the cat." And this seems to place well in this idea of giant monsters as well considering the potential size difference between any given cat species and a canary, and thats before even speaking of the ideas that it can lead to. In Jurassic World of course this was humans being their own undoing by bringing back so many dinosaurs that they threatened the world. But in Pacific Rim, Kaiju became the monster from another reality and the human's view of being top of the world was shattered. Similar in Attack on Titan (spoilers btw) they find that the creation of the titans was the doing of one particular set of humans to keep the world away, and in doing so while they were still a physical threat, they became less of an existential threat that Giant Monsters normally are and it centers the focus back on humans vs humans.
There's also the titans from Xenoblade Chronicles 2. Massive creatures are moving countries. They have a whole kingdom living on them and inside them. Mines, towns, and vehicles.
One of my favorite examples is the video game series Xenoblade Chronicles. The first one takes place on the corpses of two giants surrounded by an endless ocean. The life that lives on these bodies are in an endless war, just as the giants were many years ago. The ‘sequel’ Xenoblade 2 I think takes this in a more interesting direction. This world has many much smaller titans that roam an endless sea of clouds. These titans are alive and can be interacted with, some of them are small enough that two warring nation turn them into battleships and ferries across the cloud sea. The driving plot of the game is that the titans are slowly dying off, and when they do, there will be no more land for the humans to live on.
Interesting that this video came out just a few days after I started playing The Wandering Village. Really put’s what drew me to that game into perspective.
I've designed the single most concluded world ive made yet, and I'm using two of your videos to create angels, this one, and your one on writing the unwritable, so thank you!
This is a weird example but Jack from Subjectively’s Kaijune worldbuilding is a great example of combining the competition and exploitation approaches to writing giant monsters. If you like these stories it’s totally worth checking out, plus the art is amazing.
I feel obligated to mention the game Subnautica, the most fear inducing non-horror game ever. Its majestic world full of wonders and things to explore are inhabit by enormous creatures that the game fittingly calls "leviathan class organisms", large sea creatures. What is interesting is that a lot, but not all, are aggressive and although you can "compete" (kill) with them the game doesn't encourage you to do so. You gain no reward to killing anything in the game. Ever. On top of that, your greatest weapon, a survival knife, would take hundreds of blows to kill a single one of this enormous beings. And at first that might seem the best option because they are scary (specially the Ripper Leviathan) but over time as you explore the game and learn how this creatures behave, you slowly start thriving in the planet, and the leviathans stop being scary beasts of impossible power and become large animals that you can ride with the grappling hook of your mecha suit.
One of my favorite examples of giant monster stories is from a game called Alvora Tactics. I’ve barely played it so far and don’t know what twists are in the game but the basic idea is that there is this massive flying worm like monster called Alvora that occasionally dives down to the surface to eat whatever is unfortunate to be in its path. However at some point the monster is mysteriously found dead, crashed lifeless on a hill side. Now it’s your job to delve into this monster’s insides and loot any valuables that weren’t digested, and probably figure out what caused Avlora to suddenly die.
Denmark and the Netherlands are mostly flat. I have sens hills but I had this feeling the first time I saw a mountain in Switzerland. Just the largest stone wall I had ever seen.
Because of this video I read the leviathan trilogy, they are now some of my favourite books (the steam/dieselpunk, bioengineering and drawings in the book are all things I really like), so if anyone knows of similar books suggestions would be appreciated
Giant monsters, or even just monsters with Giant-sized power in a more reasonably-sized body, have an interesting possibility to them. Far too many people will just refuse to comprehend that level of scale, but I find one of the ways to yank it into focus is unusual geographical features. What if there’s a massive lake or series of lakes in a spot that doesn’t fully make sense on geological forces alone? A desert or arid badlands abruptly surrounded by landscapes with otherwise lush plant life and fertile soil? Volcanic obsidian spires where no volcanic activity has occurred in at least the last billion years? Creatures whose mere waking movements and presence are akin to a force of nature that we cannot fight, only adapt to. Living natural-disasters are a power that can suddenly and irrevocably change the geography of the very land that characters walk upon, and it’s exactly the sort of thing that can utterly change the worldview of someone who glimpses the distant past or gets sent there somehow.
This triad of dynamics with Giant Monster is the thematical epicenter of my world, DISMALIA. As Demons descend from the Nightmare Above, outer space, essentially, they come in hordes, legions and varied but often massive world altering sizes. They bleed into our reality, they coagulate into carnal forms as a reaction of our gravity, which once within our atmosphere their hellish cosmic radiation alters the physical natural world. They mutate it. But it has been this way, for countless eons. The planet nurtures from the spilled blood and fluids of demons slain by mankind or themselves. Once filtered through the soil. They are life givers, even if that life is twisted and nightmarish. They influences a humanity in every stage of this Triad. Eons ago, in forgotten times, humanity and demons Coexisted semi independedtly. This was followed by a ruthless unification, the rise of a reality bending Empire where demons cooperated with a new humanity. In the present, an Apocalypse severed these communions, and now it is the time of competition. Humanity Butchers demons, harvests their substances and consumes it via their Alchemical purification, making Elixirs that mutate humanity into a diabolic chimera. Mutants and Hybrids are a norm in this world, as Demons, after so many generations bound to our Earth, lose their Divine Cosmic Radiation, their essence fractures into something chaotic and frenzied. Primal and Bestial. Their aggression to humanity is guided by a Hatred internalize to their very bones, but they are so unstable from their lost radiance that they cannot remember why, we are their enemies. These three elements of Coexistence, Cooperation and Competition intertwine in present time narratives with characters that interact with demons differently from the expectation. I am glad the Foundry tackled the deep philosophies of these narratives.
Great video my dude! The world I’m building incorporates massive sentient machines that basically have the brains of feral animals, and this really helped me lay out how I wanted them to interact with the people inhabiting the world.
I once created a world where the two continents are split by a titanic creature, which is later found to be a massive robot, that endlessly plows along a single path. It cut the planet's continent into two, and the races of the world often "hitch a ride" on the creature, latching on their ships with hooks.
I've watched a lot of very enjoyable video essays and explorations on the titanic fauna of Monster Hunter. While many of the wyverns, beasts, leviathans, oversized arthropods, and apocalyptic dragons don't quite reach the size of traditional Kaiju, humanoid societies within this world have been in competition with terrifying super-predators and territorial forces of destruction for ages, and that influence is so wonderfully visible in a lot of the world design. Monster Hunter doesn't delve into a great deal of worldbuilding within a majority of the core games, but I'm consistently awed by the the visuals of tradeports and holdfasts built from titanic bones, stirred by the bristling defenses and fortifications safeguarding the few surviving cities, enamored by the bizarre engineering and artisanship that goes into scale and plate armor or ludicrous monster-slaying weaponry, and even inspired by the overall temperament of the people who call these lands home. For the humans, lynians, wyverians, troverians, and so forth who have continued to preserve societies and livelihoods in Monster Hunter, monsters are just a part of life. While the unstable ecology of their realm can occasionally throw them a curveball in the form of an elder dragon or a particularly aggressive invasive species, the people of Monster Hunter always look forward, never cowering under the shadow these beasts, always willing to give their all to avert disasters and keep the natural world in balance. Balanced, so long as there are enough predatory megafauna around so that I can finally get that one rare gem I've been looking for on the 1,142nd try. Sheesh, what's a hunter gotta do to complete an armor set these days?
THIS VIDEO WAS SO HELPFUL!! I have been wanting to design and write a fantasy world of my own with how much I have been fascinated by dragons since I was born (Eragon was one of my favorite movies since I was a kid even if it is a bad one by the eyes of the readers) and this video is 100% going to be a source for me to remind myself ways to do things and the choices to make along the way, thank you so much for this entire Worldbuilding playlist and for explaining things so well and in a digestable way
I made a world recently with such behemoths as a major theme. They are certainly looked on in awe. They are hunted sometimes for wealth and prestige. They are worshipped and, to the extent possible, protected. They shape the world around them, as people come up with ways of keeping them out of cities, and as cities are built near their migratory routes. Its not one or the other. It's all of it.
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CAMPFIRE ➤ bit.ly/TF_Mobile
Campfire’s such a fabulous, accommodating tool. Honestly, if you’re intimidated by writing and worldbuilding, it’s just a relief to have something like this that breaks it all down and makes it super simple for you! Go give it a try!
Cool 😎
Could you do a video on how to write a action story without it being "dumb." Like a action story with actual plot, character development, and doesn't slow down to a crawl to just tell a story. Thank you.
I agree about those massive striders in Morrowind. When I first saw them when I was little was awe inspiring. They were just the fast travel creatures but I had so many ideas about what they were and how they came to do the job they do.
Please cover “Godmeat” by Martin Cahill ❤
Campfire is great for world building!
A recurring theme in the monsterverse is that creatures like Godzilla, King Kong, Mothra and Rodan ruled the earth before humans did and if we aren't careful, these titans will take their world back by force.
yeah , it's like the ice ages , we are currently living in the glacial minimum , a period between ice ages , all of human civilization does ,
and well godzilla is the same : they merely whent in slumber while chemically powered creatures like us did their hown things ,
they are ready to come back up again and treat the whole world with it's concrete buildings , it's steel bridges like papermachet
Heck, they nearly did when Ghidorah was awakened, although he would’ve turned it into a world after his own desire, not benefitting the planet
Tbh, I honestly think that humans should go extinct because we are slowly killing the planet
@@davidegaruti2582 I always loved the concept of “mankind tries to solve an environmental problem and the solution creates a new problem. Like in Stray where they made a bacteria to eat the litter humanity has made, the Bacteria rapidly grows and mutates and becomes a nearly world ending disaster that nonetheless resulted in humanity dying. Then theirs the classic “solve global warming and accidentally create an Ice Age” mankind in its hubris looked for ways to clean up its mess with the destructive efficiency in which the mess itself was created.
It seems like the creators were fans of HP Lovecraft.
Depending on the situation, I kind of like feeling small. It feels safer sometimes, when you're a little kid, everything is big, the people who protect you, are big. The walls around you that protect you from harsh weather and temperature are big, and I just wanna be a small creature hiding peacefully with the larger things around me.
The feeling you get when you're around the gentle giants, like blue whales and whale sharks. I kinda think that we are lacking in stories that explore what it is like to be protected by something bigger and stronger.
What it feels like to be lil spoon ^^
This sounds a lot like the Hobbit fantasy.
One thing I love about giant monsters is that even though you can see what they’re like on the outside, you can never quite tell what they’re like on the inside. Do they have human emotions like us? Do they behave more like a dog or a lion? Or do they simply hide their personalities altogether. As someone who has written a lot of monster characters, mostly dragons, it is something I think about a lot.
You made me think about another thing. Isn't it funny that we ask ourselves those questions *only* when we see a big creature? I mean,, I fear bugs, but they are small, I could k1ll them easily, I don't ask myself those questions, but I do when I'm before an animal bigger than myself.
I have a world where I explore some of these things. At a time long in the past the humans and dragons cooperated with each other and the other sentient races. But that all fell apart, and now the dragons squabble among themselves while aggressively keeping anyone else out of their territories. In steps my protagonist, a girl with more ambition than sense. What will happen?
@@sarahluchies1076 sounds like a great story!
I like how varied dragons are in this respect. You have giant lumbering beasts, tiny little rats, dragons that are akin to dogs/cats/horses, dragons that are sapient and can either speak English to you or speak through telepathy, and dragons that are so much smarter and experienced than humans that they just don't care about us and would rather we weren't taking coins from their gold pile.
Dragons are easily the most flexible creatures, they've been used everywhere in history in so many different ways.
Yeah me too
These concepts directly relate to the worldbuilding concept I've been working on as an experiment with scale! I'm trying to make a world where the reader gets simultaneously invested in the lives of creatures of wildly different sizes who all exist in the same world, often not even aware of each other's existence. It's so much fun to use perspective as a tool like that to tell such unique stories!
This sounds so interesting, are you uploading your work anywhere?
I would love to read about it.
So... Zootopia?
(I'm joking, that sounds really interesting.)
Oh that sounds really cool. I'm imagining like some baby of the big race playing with a ball which is actually the planet of the small race and from their perspective this is like an earthquake or something
@@THExRISER Currently in the early planning stages, but hoping to make it into a low-budget RUclips series eventually. I'll do a lot of worldbuilding with short stories in the meantime, but I haven't yet decided where to upload them.
@@geoffreyprecht2410 oh hell yeah, ill watch the living frick out of it mz good sir
As someone who has been raised by Giant monsters and robots, watching Ultraman and other hero shows as a child, seeing how the west does kaiju and giants is so interesting.
By the way, sir, I know you knowthis, your voice is super cool and nice to listen to. I love this channel have for years. I hope you never leave permanently. Even if you take long breaks :) hope this week goes well for you and everyon else involved in this channel
Im thinking about how voice can mold into what you and people you want to talk to want them to be - obviously tone and manierisms or something can change and doing it partly subconcious could change the overall feel a lot ...?
I see moose every day here in the kenai peninsula. Their massive. Bears dont even usually ever wanna mess with them unless their the young ones
A rule to live by for most people “a moose is always bigger than you think it is”
@@Broomer52 always
@@mudshrooze my question is if I rode one would we fit through the in and out drive through?
I love the way Monster Hunter does this. Ignoring the ludonarrative dissonance of being able to hunt an infinite number of monsters, I really like the way the world presents humans as just another cog in the machine of nature, human machinery and weapons just another attribute like a dragon's fire breath or their powerful claws. If one side throws nature off-balance, the other responds to keep it in check.
Canonically, your hunter only does each quest once.
MH does a lot to balance out gameplay and lore, however I wish more was done to make it obvious.
My setting named Waori is built on this concept. There are no static cities or towns, everyone lives inside creatures so large that the people inside are able to move through tubes alongside blood vessels. They live in hollow sections near organs, and they create machines that help the biological functions to be more efficient. Basically, the people are to these creatures what the microbes in our body are to us. The merfolk developed suits to be able to swim through the digestive tract of their creatures and keep them clean, some people have machines to help clean the blood, and all of them fight off invaders that would be far too small for the creature to even see. The people within these creatures are a part of them, in a very real way.
are you making a story about it, because it sounds like a vert neat idea
@@hitfran4644 I am! No title, yet, but I’m writing a book
@@Veelofar i hope it goes well for you
Vore.
Anyways Neat Concept!
@@Veelofar “no title yet but I’m writing a novel,” said every “writer” with zero pages written
Here's a weird thought: an anti-leviathan story. An encounter with creatures much smaller than humans, who encounter us by chance, and through terrifying levels of ingenuity and resourcefulness, gain an upper hand, and now debate whether to harness us for their own ends, or maintain a respectful harmony, as we try to cope with our new reversed place in nature.
Sounds a lot like the Lilliputs from Gulliver's Travels.
That would be terrifying
Damn I wish I was smaller
Basically a monster hunter like story but from the monsters perspective
Sounds like sausage feast
OH MY GOD DUDE, i read the leviathan books in school growing up and forgot what they where called and i've been searching for them forever now, thanks!
My daughter loved those and made me read them. :D
ME TOOO
The illustrations are so pretty, I'd love to have those on my shelf someday
It’s worth noting that in Wings of Fire, a few dragons are known for keeping humans as pets, with one even building an entire town just to study humans.
The main conflict for the first 5 books was started because a human stabbed the dragon who ruled the desert in the tail, and the power grab became a continent-wide war.
I've been obsessing over Wings of Fire lately and was really happy to see it pop up here. The series continues to do really interesting things with the dichotomy in the current state of its world between dragons and humans. The most interesting part to me is how sparingly the "scavengers" _are_ used most of the time, which makes the flashes of them we see feel special and interesting to come from the opposite perspective as your typical fantasy conflicts. The cherry on top for this, to me, is how dragons sometimes accuse each other of "anthropomorphising" the scavengers, since they're seen as insignificant animals like raccoons or something without sapience. And ultimately, the series does bring in elements of the two learning about each other again, and most dragons are horrified at the thought of being violent to humans once they learn how similar they are mentally.
To be fair, a scavenger did cause a 20 year long, continent-wide war.
And Winter was finally right for a change.
So scavengers ARE humans. I just started reading the first book and i had no idea humans exist in Wings of fire. I was wondering if the creatures they talk about are humans or not. I can't wait to become a fan. I just now got to buy the first book and it looks good so far :D
this video can be very helpful for one of the stories I want to make.
it's a fantasy story about a girl who is a giant made by the main villain of the story and a mercenary.
Sinopsis: the villain is a immortal human who lived long enought to learn how to bend the rules of the world in a limited way, but enought to change and control living beings, and he made her to be a war machine, but he never got to really finish her, so she (our MC) awakes alone on her birth place, a place who seems almost like a mix of a lab and a mage workshop but completely taken over by nature, with no memories of any past and incapable of speach, but with a enormous size of 50ft tall and a powerful regenerative ability who makes her almost unstopable on conventional combat (yes, you know where the aspiration comes from, but the similarities end here with what comes next).
At the same time, there is this young cocky cat boy who, despite being short, is a mercenary who hunts monsters for a living (monsters made by the main villain btw), and one day he goes alone on a hunt for a big monster who is killing and eating other monsters on the area disrupting the guild's business, but he ends up almost being killed, but is saved by a giant girl (our MC) and she kind of "adopts" hin.
what I want to do in this story is a wholesome "Cat and owner" dinamic where the reader will never be sure who is the "cat" and who is the "owner", since the girl can't speak and can't really understand hin but stay around because she finds hin "cute", while he is the one who want's to be in charge but can't really order her in any way since she is much bigger than hin, so he slowly learns to be humble and patient while she slowly learns about how to communicate and how the world works, meanwhile there is also the more tense and brutal parts, since the world is in chaos and both of then eventualy has to deal with a lot of conflics comming from each of their sides and origins.
there is also way more to it since it's only a side story of the actual big plot I want to make with this villain mentioned as the main character, but I hope one day I get to finish this one first.
thank you for anyone who readed this far and I hope anyone here likes the idea and maybe even give sugestions on how to do it :^D
I have a question what does the characters look like?
Is it huminoid?
Is it made out metal flesh ore both?
I would like to know
@@spice_maker well, she looks like a regular teenage albino human save for her huge size (50ft tall) and a tore down green colored body suit that grew with her during the experiment.
the only thing unnatural that can be seen in her body (aside for the size) is a purple glow where her heart should be.
her bones are made of a special tipe of artificial steel who's property is to not only weight less but also make things it is "linked" with to be less effected by gravity (this is a minor way to solve the "fisics problem" her existence causes :^V )
while he is a cat boy with brown skin who can be confused for a short human (5ft 7) if not for his tail who he can use as a extra arm to carry some of his tools and dressed with leather and fur gear, some knifes, a crossbow and tools to make traps.
the story takes place mostly in a huge cold forest where the trees can easily reach 100ft tall and has brances and roots "connected" to each other, making it the ideal place for his agility and mobility and for her to hide from civilization.
So they become companions and partners. I would much prefer to witness the story of bonds over the story of an immortal human who lost his humanity.
@@andresmarrero8666 the Immortal villain will also have a lot of focus on bonds since his theme can be resumed to: "building a family that can live for as long as he does".
so in a way, the story betwen those two mentioned will be kind of a "experiment" to see how I will build the main plot.
One of my favourite worlds where men and giant beasts live in harmony, is the world of Monster Hunter. Here there are monsters that shoot lazers, are as big as entire countries or can launch themselves in the air and plumet down with the force of a small comet. But the people aren't just surviving, they are thriving. And it doesn't come at the cost of the monster population, judging how there is always another quest. And with Stories, we know that there are entire civilizations that ride on them. It has so many fascinating implications
I remember I made a drawing like that. A nuclear submarine on an ocean planet finds an enormous beast, an eel-like creature with eyes bigger than the entire sub, but outside their view we can see the entire back of the creature was bitten off in one bite, and the leviathan monster is in the background, five eyes on one side of the head all locked onto the tiny sub. After all…
…there’s always a bigger fish ;)
As someone whose been a fan of The Wings of Fire series since the 4th grade, I'm glad to see that the book series is getting more recognition!
There's a game called "The Wandering Village" on Steam which delves into this theme of living in a village on the back of a giant travelling creature called an Onbu. It gives you a choice to live harmoniously and protect the Onbu where the village exists, or to exploit it like a parasite to further improve the lives of the villagers.
For the fighting tension, you can have some groups that can beat the monsters and where some monsters are winning, varying region by region, maybe by climate
Wings of fire does include a human city that possesses dragon killing weaponry, but it’s such an outlier that it’s a pretty big surprise to even the main cast of characters
An example of a giant being I'd like to point out are the Leviathans from Mass Effect (specifically the Leviathan DLC for Mass Effect 3). Massive, cuttlefish like, with telepathic abilities and the capacity to move through space and the deep sea. The mere concept of being able to handle that much of a range of atmospheric pressures is both fascinating and a bit scary to me.
Was NOT expecting WoF to be mentioned, still, after years of having been beyond the target audience, I find those books comforting, just something about them that draws me in like nothing else, and makes me feel nice.
I find the giant monster that you revealed at the end to be very interesting. Have I missed a video where you concluded the ongoing story that you had for this series?
Are you talking about that giant owl or Terry Pratchett's world turtle?
@@gallifrox6099 I mean the thing that broke out of the cage and the robot went to chase
... it's just a payoff to that little image in the beginning of the video where it was in the cage. There is no story.
@@giantmastersword no, at the beginning of the tale foundry series I thought that there was something about the robot being in touch with someone outside the Foundry
And interesting example of your last point, where we ourselves are the giant creatures, would be in the borrowers story naturally, but a good version from a video game would be lungfishopolis in psychonauts. In that part of the game you're confronted with the idea that big scary animals are more afraid of you than you are of them. And thus in the mental world of the giant lungfish monster you encounter, you appear as a kaiju. And the whole point of the game is to interact with the mental defenses of the world, which are interpreted as a military force. It turns out that the giant lungfish is being controlled by the main villain who is spreading propaganda about you and mobilizing the military against you. It's a way of showing what a significant threat to the villains plans you are. At the very end you fight a psychic projection of the villain in the lung fish's brain in a battle inspired by tokusatsu films like Ultraman
What about Smurfs? David The Gnome?
Another incredible example of this is Hayao Miyazaki's Princess Mononoke. The question of mere coexistence or competition adds a constant and engaging tension.
My favorite Miyazaki movie
Holy crap, I was NOT expecting a Wings of Fire shoutout!
That just made my day😁
I'm personally using the "giant primordial monster" troupe In the way the SCP universe mostly uses it's elder gods. Where although they are barely mentioned , their existence has ripple effects throughout the whole story and is used to explain what is usually just assumed to be "normal" in fantasy or sci-fi settings.
I just rewatched End of Evangelion, and I'd be fascinated to see what you make of that, as a sort of intersection of giant horror and cosmic horror.
Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is a fantastic take on coexisting with giants and I love it so much.
XC1 gave us the biggest boys. mechonis and bionis are so big that you basically fight with their equivalent of white blood cells at some point X"D and so far I like it a bit more than XB2 (but maybe XB2 feels just small now, just after epic ending of XB1)
In the first Godzilla movies, the *_kaiju_* were simply giant predators, terrifying creatures which were a great danger to humanity. Over time, a strange mythology developed in which some *_kaiju_* were "good monsters", particularly friends to children, defending humanity from the "bad monsters".
I can so easily see a mythology like that developing in a world in which *_kaiju_* exist, with refugee children interpreting the movements and behavior of *_kaiju_* as they happen not to step on the ruined house in which they are sheltering, or to turn their stream of fire aside just before it would have incinerated a column of refugees, when in truth it was just a random turn of events in the course of a battle with another territorial *_kaiju_* or a search for food.
Children living in shelters around New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina told one another stories about witnessing battles between bands of angels and devils across the city as a way of interpreting the chaotic landscape they were living in. Even Armageddon was preferable in their minds over the reality of mere chaos.
I always find the presence of giant creatures fascinating. The most interesting concept I read (in my humble opinion) were the Ogre Gods from the comic "Petit" (by Gatignol and Hubert), where those giants are not just the apex predators but also the highest in the social hierarchy, being the kings and nobility who dominate (and eat) humans. There's also a parallel with the french XVIII nobility.
There is an example of almost every possible interaction like this in Stellaris. There are giant beasts in the game, some as large as entire planets, and how they are treated can vastly differ from game to game, empire to empire. They can be murdered indiscriminately, put in a zoo as an attraction, studied for research, used for manual labor, forced into the army as shock troops, bread and used as pets, pacified into coexistence with enough study or by simply being passive by nature, worshiped, or offered tribute in the hopes they don't just eat everyone.
Some of my favorite big monsters are the Titans from Xenoblade 1 and Xenoblade 2. Not only does it invoke a lot of things described in this video, but by having humanity live on giants changes how geography works. And that’s just a really neat angle to look at this from
I love your videos man !! You explain everything so perfectly and lay out all the facts. Your videos are very thought provoking too
I always thought that with such creatures the whole balance is changed. Either they remain along certain paths and humanity seek them out, or humanity is forced into a nomadic existence. Shadiversity did a series of videos on how monsters would change a world completely, humanity becoming more militant in the event of monsters like orcs and zombies, while vampires would make humanity more paranoid. Nevermind what dragons do. If there's a bunch of kaiju's mucking about humanity would become more quick moving
Godzilla and Giant Monsters in general have always been a part of my childhood and imagination, this video was so nice in exploring why I love the concept so much. The scale, the sense of awe. The knowledge that we as people aren't as in control as we think. Godzilla especially exemplifies this, a force of nature, of destruction, of revenge against man's nuclear hubris. So many different interpretations in just one character. But I've always loved this one quote from Godzilla 2014, "The arrogance of man is thinking nature is in our control, and not the other way around."
I love your videos a lot, especially ones about concepts like these.
So when I saw the video display a picture of Wings of Fire, my little nerd brain LOST IT because time is one of my favorite things of all time. Same thing when you brought up HTTYD! I love both of these series and I'm starting to think this is the concept that links both of them to why I enjoy them! Keep making your videos, I love them so much!
This topic is actually very current for me. I happened to create a world for my homebrew dnd campaing kinda by randomly having to explain things to my players. The world in question was created by divine dragons and by the suffering of their offspring. I like the thought of creation trough suffering, so i had one of the dragons (the mother) be murdered by lesser races. And her rotting corpse gave birth to demons. One of her children buried her by singing the mountains ontop of her, the other cried the oceans in her grief. Inspiration was taken from everywhere on this one.
I would love to hear more video insights from magic the gathering lore! Love the references here!
In the world of Dragonlance there have always been regular size dragons that people ride into battle but then in the later books they get invaded by the three smallest dragons from a reality where they are huge to the point of absurdity and it changes the dynamics of the world they take it over completely and eat all the other dragons and the sheer size of them causes the kender species that had never been capable of fear before to have like a cultural ptsd it was all really interesting stuff and a fun shake up to the setting
Another aspect of the 3 ways tension is created from giant creatures, as highlighted by the How to Train your Dragon example & well as other media like Fang & Spear: the dynamics can shift in the story. You can shift from competition to forming a co-operative bond, that bond or general co-existence can crumble, or humans can let go of a parasitic relationship and allow beasts to co-exist again.
It’s a very interesting kind of tension, because depending on the depiction of humans & the giant creatures: it can be volatile & ever changing.
I remember making concept art for a beast, that after decades of slumbering, blended in with the mountains, only to wake up from miners striking the inside of it's nostril... and how there's a giant mechanical city, based off of the legends of that same beast
7:15 is that a SCP-1762 reference I see… still brings tears to my eyes every time I think about said scp.
This is one of my favorite subjects and your voice makes learning more about it a delight.
Wow!! I never thought I'd hear someone just talk about wings of fire, its not exactly super popular so seeing that series mentioned was cool
I did not expect to see Wings of Fire mentioned here! Funnily enough Tui is actually (spoilers for the book series) slowly turning the relationship between humans and dragons to go from one of dragon dominance to one of cooperation
I wish she didn't.
@@voldy3565 Same here tbh 💀
Can honestly say I don't feel fear of big things. When I was younger I bumped into the belly of a shark. I just thought that it was extremely cool as in swam away. To be fair, it wasn't a whale. Even so, I'm more scared of needles than any giant animal.
what a bout a gaint thing with thousands of tiny needles
@@throwawayemail8450 like a very big hedgehog ?
as someone who is developing a story specifically about giant monsters, this really helped me to see all the different ways i can take the plot, i didn't realise there was so much possiblity for me to build with
Just want to say that this is one of my favourite videos from Tale Foundry so far. The stories, the world-building possibilities & the real world connotations are so well done in this video.
There is really more to Wings of Fire ( WoF ) in that regard, like humans originally ruled the entire world and the dragons just minded their own business, but humans antagonized them for no reason when they weren’t a threat at all, so first they coexisted, then the humans challenged the dragons and the dragons won. Also, at the end of the series, they end up joining forces, and a law is passed in every kingdom that dragons are not to eat humans, because they’re intelligent creatures who have a language. So then they cooperate.
You know, you could make a video on Houseki no Kuni by Haruko Ichikawa which is an extremely depressing manga
The feeling I can best use to describe my emotions when faced with things that are vastly larger, far more powerful, and infinitely older than I am, is awe. It is what the ancients called "The fear of God." It is seeing just how fleeting, frail, and limited we are compared to the universe.
The Bionis and Mechonis from Xenoblade 1 has to be one of the most impactful ways I've seen colossal creatures implemented in media.
You're introduced to them at the very beginning of the game. Two titans at the very beginning of time that came into existence, much like how we consider the Big Bang. From there, they started fighting to the death, swingin their blades at each other, cutting off limbs which would fall to the endless ocean and become entire land masses, until eventually, both titans would catch themselves in a stalemate. Both titans now locked in place, their now-lifeless bodies frozen like statues, whilst new life is born on each titan, and a selfsustaining ecosystem begins anew.
Your first reminder of this reality is when you finish a scene where two factions are fighting eachother. Homs; the humans that were born from the Bionis and are more or less the "humans" of the world, and Mechon; the cold, heartless machines that appeared to be on the attack from their source of origin: the Mechonis.
As the scene finishes up, the camera zooms out, showing the weird scrappy wasteland the factions are fighting on. We're given these amazing, sweeping shots of all sorts of other environments we've never seen before as the camera takes us on a mysterious journey before finally cutting to show the husks of both titans, and you realise that this war was taking place on the very sword that the Mechonis was weilding, wedged deeply into the Bionis itself, and acting as a bridge between the two worlds.
Throughout the game, no matter where you are, so long as you can see the sky, you can see the large looming figure of the Mechonis and it's sword thrust above you, into your homeland when you look up. In the day, it's large, black, lifeless figure leaves you in awe that the origin of the worlds are so clearly evident for you to see. And at night, while the body of the Mechonis is harder to make out, it's eyes still glow an ominous red, as brightly as the stars which sprinkle the clouds.
There's SO much more to the game, and even more of these moments and ones equal to them, but I highly encourage people to play the game for themselves to find them out for the first time.
Monster Hunter is a pretty good example of a handful of a handful of the talking points in this video. Ongoing competition being the biggest part.
One really nice example of coexistence between man and monster is the Dragonriders of Pern series. Haven't read much of it, but the best I can describe is humans creating inseparable bonds with dragons to combat an extraterrestrial threat.
My idea is that monsters the size of entire countries wander around, and so people need to move their cities in line with the area's specific "traveler season" travelers being those big monsters. Everything gets out of their way, people, animals, plants, everything! But people don't have very mobile cities, so when it's traveler season, everything has to stop, drop what it's doing, and hightail it out of the way. This means that it's easy to prey on cities that need to get out of the way. Why build cities then? Because the world is hostile enough to make division of labor on that level absolutely necessary for even a chance of survival
I greatly appreciate this episode, thank you so much! One of the projects I am working on involves worlds with megafauna in them and how two groups of people interact with those creature. This has been very enlightening
I really like the points brought up in this video. In the modern age of climate crisis we're very quick to look to these monsters we fight as having human qualities, like being treated like we treat rats, reviled and exterminated. It can be a great reflection of some aspects of humanity and it resonates because it is a part of humanity we struggle to reconcile with. But we should also see ourselves reflected in the benevolent giants. The world turtle reflecting meteors is an excellent example of a parallel to humanity after NASA deflected an asteroid. But even on the small everyday scale, we look after pets and rescue animals in danger. To the animals, we're some mystical, impossible-to-understand entity who protects them for reasons they can't understand. Although we do plenty of harm we do plenty of good too, and we should see aspects of ourselves reflected in all manner of powerful creatures.
Love the Giant Monsters in the Xenoblade series. Especially Xenoblade 1 & 2 where you get to inhabit and explore them.
This channel has served a myriad purposes for me personally. On the one hand its been a constant source of entertainment. And on the other, for an individual who constantly struggles with finding creative outlets for all the random urges and ideas that take over my mind for a couple of weeks, and has no idea how to go about actualizing them you guys provide reassurence that the process is indeed as hard as it feels. Not to mention show us all the unique worlds and stories people have created and analyze them in a way I could only dream of doing. So thanks for all the work you guys do and I'll be sure to try out Campfire. Keep up the good work
2 types of fantasy:
1) Once dragons lived in this land... We can only hope that their wisdom and magic will shine upon us once again...
2) There are too much f*cking dragons!
You include so much thought and references to many of my favorite fantasies. This channel does so much, and I've been an avid fan. It's amazing how far you have come.
Tale Foundry, keep making stuff up!
a few videos of this channel is currently very helpful for my English writing assignment
I'm now making a variation on the alex kisters world from the mandela catalogue but a few you tale foundry's videos helped a lot with the structure and characters. i am very thankful for this channel and yes I am having fun writing the story(first time in year I had fun writing tbh).
Nice of you to mention the humble silt strider. That game has a special place in my heart.
13:00 To be fair, the Avanc's illness was first discovered when the citizens dived down to it and found someone had dug huge trenches around its body, which became infected. They weren't actually the ones who did this.
9:28 one you missed under the competing is when the humans ends up becoming the giant monster to even the playing field which IMO is one of the better ones
Something related to silt striders and skyrim in particular. There are so many "lasts" in skyrim that are so heart wrenchingly sad. The last snow elf, the last dark brotherhood sanctuary, the last silt strider, and finally the last dragonborn. I always imagine my character having a moment while gently petting dusty's carapace listening to her mournful song as if she's calling out for her kin but never gets an answer like she used to. All while the dragonborn is on a quest to kill the only other being in tamriel like them for the sake of people that'll never understand them or even really thank them for what they did on their behalf. Every build and character we make in skyrim has unbelievable depression and i challenge anyone to prove me wrong.
Your channel has gotten a lot different at narrating but I love it as much as ever, been watching for years! Keep it up!
A wonderful example of worldbuilding with gigantic beings is the project "Mystery Flesh Pit National Park" by Trevor Roberts where a sedentary subterranean superorganism is turned into a theme park.
It is not for the squeamish, but it is morbidly fascinating to peruse.
I’m glad you showed a clip from Hilda cause I find the Midnight Giant to be one of the most whimsical titans ever. How the giants once dominated the world but as humanity grew and expanded the giants found they couldn’t wander the Earth anymore as they would accidentally step on the human communities causing them to fear and judge the giants as heartless monsters. So they were left with no choice other than to leave the Earth behind in search of a new home except for one who remained behind waiting for to meet with his lover.
Even just thinking about the number of possibilities for stories that could be told with giant monstrosities and animals makes my head swim
A great example of the feeling given by Giant monsters, as well as the world building of a world full of those monsters, is the Mouse Guard book series. Absolutely amazing!
I know this came out a year ago, but I cannot believe I saw my favorite book series of all time (Wings of Fire) mentioned in a Tale Foundry video
In my family we have a tradition of white water rafting in the spring. When my youngest asked why. I at 1st thought about the fun & excitement. Then I thought about it from her 7 year old view. I realized we do it to feel small again. To face something greater than we will ever be & come out together, even if you spent the whole time in the water.
I feel like the worldbuilding of How to Train Your Dragon is far more interesting in the books because it does show how people ultimately exploit the dragons and said dragons are more blatantly sentient. Almost certianly not the best example but it's a good one.
For better or for worse, there was a good point of view and phrase to this concept in one of the Jurassic World movies where Henry Wu states "...To a canary, a cat is a monster. We are just used to being the cat." And this seems to place well in this idea of giant monsters as well considering the potential size difference between any given cat species and a canary, and thats before even speaking of the ideas that it can lead to. In Jurassic World of course this was humans being their own undoing by bringing back so many dinosaurs that they threatened the world. But in Pacific Rim, Kaiju became the monster from another reality and the human's view of being top of the world was shattered. Similar in Attack on Titan (spoilers btw) they find that the creation of the titans was the doing of one particular set of humans to keep the world away, and in doing so while they were still a physical threat, they became less of an existential threat that Giant Monsters normally are and it centers the focus back on humans vs humans.
This video is a defenition of why I love giant creatures in fiction.
And also a little plus point for mentioning Wings of Fire. :)
AAA IM SO HAPPY SOMEONE TALKED ABOUT THE LEVIATHAN SERIES WITH THIS!
3:43 The abnormal titans running caught me off-guard
7:08 OMG, I've had read the original article and I'm so happy and sad at the same time
There's also the titans from Xenoblade Chronicles 2. Massive creatures are moving countries. They have a whole kingdom living on them and inside them. Mines, towns, and vehicles.
One of my favorite examples is the video game series Xenoblade Chronicles.
The first one takes place on the corpses of two giants surrounded by an endless ocean. The life that lives on these bodies are in an endless war, just as the giants were many years ago.
The ‘sequel’ Xenoblade 2 I think takes this in a more interesting direction. This world has many much smaller titans that roam an endless sea of clouds. These titans are alive and can be interacted with, some of them are small enough that two warring nation turn them into battleships and ferries across the cloud sea. The driving plot of the game is that the titans are slowly dying off, and when they do, there will be no more land for the humans to live on.
Love that you used Magic to illustrate worldbuilding, it really has a lot of super deep detailed worldbuilding.
Interesting that this video came out just a few days after I started playing The Wandering Village. Really put’s what drew me to that game into perspective.
I've designed the single most concluded world ive made yet, and I'm using two of your videos to create angels, this one, and your one on writing the unwritable, so thank you!
This is a weird example but Jack from Subjectively’s Kaijune worldbuilding is a great example of combining the competition and exploitation approaches to writing giant monsters. If you like these stories it’s totally worth checking out, plus the art is amazing.
I feel obligated to mention the game Subnautica, the most fear inducing non-horror game ever. Its majestic world full of wonders and things to explore are inhabit by enormous creatures that the game fittingly calls "leviathan class organisms", large sea creatures. What is interesting is that a lot, but not all, are aggressive and although you can "compete" (kill) with them the game doesn't encourage you to do so. You gain no reward to killing anything in the game. Ever. On top of that, your greatest weapon, a survival knife, would take hundreds of blows to kill a single one of this enormous beings. And at first that might seem the best option because they are scary (specially the Ripper Leviathan) but over time as you explore the game and learn how this creatures behave, you slowly start thriving in the planet, and the leviathans stop being scary beasts of impossible power and become large animals that you can ride with the grappling hook of your mecha suit.
One of my favorite examples of giant monster stories is from a game called Alvora Tactics. I’ve barely played it so far and don’t know what twists are in the game but the basic idea is that there is this massive flying worm like monster called Alvora that occasionally dives down to the surface to eat whatever is unfortunate to be in its path. However at some point the monster is mysteriously found dead, crashed lifeless on a hill side. Now it’s your job to delve into this monster’s insides and loot any valuables that weren’t digested, and probably figure out what caused Avlora to suddenly die.
Denmark and the Netherlands are mostly flat. I have sens hills but I had this feeling the first time I saw a mountain in Switzerland. Just the largest stone wall I had ever seen.
Because of this video I read the leviathan trilogy, they are now some of my favourite books (the steam/dieselpunk, bioengineering and drawings in the book are all things I really like), so if anyone knows of similar books suggestions would be appreciated
This has really helped!! I have 4 world building projects including a new kaiju project. This video was really inspiring!
Giant monsters, or even just monsters with Giant-sized power in a more reasonably-sized body, have an interesting possibility to them.
Far too many people will just refuse to comprehend that level of scale, but I find one of the ways to yank it into focus is unusual geographical features.
What if there’s a massive lake or series of lakes in a spot that doesn’t fully make sense on geological forces alone?
A desert or arid badlands abruptly surrounded by landscapes with otherwise lush plant life and fertile soil?
Volcanic obsidian spires where no volcanic activity has occurred in at least the last billion years?
Creatures whose mere waking movements and presence are akin to a force of nature that we cannot fight, only adapt to.
Living natural-disasters are a power that can suddenly and irrevocably change the geography of the very land that characters walk upon, and it’s exactly the sort of thing that can utterly change the worldview of someone who glimpses the distant past or gets sent there somehow.
This triad of dynamics with Giant Monster is the thematical epicenter of my world, DISMALIA. As Demons descend from the Nightmare Above, outer space, essentially, they come in hordes, legions and varied but often massive world altering sizes.
They bleed into our reality, they coagulate into carnal forms as a reaction of our gravity, which once within our atmosphere their hellish cosmic radiation alters the physical natural world. They mutate it. But it has been this way, for countless eons. The planet nurtures from the spilled blood and fluids of demons slain by mankind or themselves. Once filtered through the soil. They are life givers, even if that life is twisted and nightmarish.
They influences a humanity in every stage of this Triad. Eons ago, in forgotten times, humanity and demons Coexisted semi independedtly. This was followed by a ruthless unification, the rise of a reality bending Empire where demons cooperated with a new humanity. In the present, an Apocalypse severed these communions, and now it is the time of competition. Humanity Butchers demons, harvests their substances and consumes it via their Alchemical purification, making Elixirs that mutate humanity into a diabolic chimera.
Mutants and Hybrids are a norm in this world, as Demons, after so many generations bound to our Earth, lose their Divine Cosmic Radiation, their essence fractures into something chaotic and frenzied. Primal and Bestial. Their aggression to humanity is guided by a Hatred internalize to their very bones, but they are so unstable from their lost radiance that they cannot remember why, we are their enemies.
These three elements of Coexistence, Cooperation and Competition intertwine in present time narratives with characters that interact with demons differently from the expectation. I am glad the Foundry tackled the deep philosophies of these narratives.
"What is that emotion you're experiencing?"
Love.
Great video my dude! The world I’m building incorporates massive sentient machines that basically have the brains of feral animals, and this really helped me lay out how I wanted them to interact with the people inhabiting the world.
I once created a world where the two continents are split by a titanic creature, which is later found to be a massive robot, that endlessly plows along a single path. It cut the planet's continent into two, and the races of the world often "hitch a ride" on the creature, latching on their ships with hooks.
3:57 Ahh, Trico. Truly, the best best boi. The Last Guardian is an amazing game.
I've watched a lot of very enjoyable video essays and explorations on the titanic fauna of Monster Hunter. While many of the wyverns, beasts, leviathans, oversized arthropods, and apocalyptic dragons don't quite reach the size of traditional Kaiju, humanoid societies within this world have been in competition with terrifying super-predators and territorial forces of destruction for ages, and that influence is so wonderfully visible in a lot of the world design.
Monster Hunter doesn't delve into a great deal of worldbuilding within a majority of the core games, but I'm consistently awed by the the visuals of tradeports and holdfasts built from titanic bones, stirred by the bristling defenses and fortifications safeguarding the few surviving cities, enamored by the bizarre engineering and artisanship that goes into scale and plate armor or ludicrous monster-slaying weaponry, and even inspired by the overall temperament of the people who call these lands home.
For the humans, lynians, wyverians, troverians, and so forth who have continued to preserve societies and livelihoods in Monster Hunter, monsters are just a part of life. While the unstable ecology of their realm can occasionally throw them a curveball in the form of an elder dragon or a particularly aggressive invasive species, the people of Monster Hunter always look forward, never cowering under the shadow these beasts, always willing to give their all to avert disasters and keep the natural world in balance. Balanced, so long as there are enough predatory megafauna around so that I can finally get that one rare gem I've been looking for on the 1,142nd try. Sheesh, what's a hunter gotta do to complete an armor set these days?
His Majesty’s Dragon is another great example of cooperative relationship.
THIS VIDEO WAS SO HELPFUL!! I have been wanting to design and write a fantasy world of my own with how much I have been fascinated by dragons since I was born (Eragon was one of my favorite movies since I was a kid even if it is a bad one by the eyes of the readers) and this video is 100% going to be a source for me to remind myself ways to do things and the choices to make along the way, thank you so much for this entire Worldbuilding playlist and for explaining things so well and in a digestable way
I made a world recently with such behemoths as a major theme. They are certainly looked on in awe. They are hunted sometimes for wealth and prestige. They are worshipped and, to the extent possible, protected. They shape the world around them, as people come up with ways of keeping them out of cities, and as cities are built near their migratory routes.
Its not one or the other. It's all of it.