Worldbuilding with GIANT MONSTERS

When you watch a movie like Jurassic Park or Godzilla or King Kong something strange starts to happen beneath the excitement of the destruction and the fighting these towering beasts and how they’re designed they make you feel something something you probably also feel when you see the huge silhouette of

A whale passing Beneath Your Vessel the first time you see how ridiculously big a moose actually is in person when you stand among the Towering Redwoods and I’ve been wondering what is that what is that emotion you’re experiencing a lot of things probably but I’m certain that they mostly stem from the simple

Realization that you are small they make you feel small that sounds obvious but it’s important and I think with all your human self-import it’s an easy thing to forget they break through your self-confidence and make you feel odd unsafe impotent unsecured you feel almost as if you’re being

Pulled into their orbit it’s no wonder these behemoths show up in so much fiction from a speculative standpoint they really give authors and artists a lot of interesting material to play with how raw physics Works upon them how the ecosystem will react how they evolved to

Be what they are the effects of the square Cube law that’s all really fascinating stuff and totally fair game but I think there’s something more fundamental here something that has less to do with Biology and ecology and more to do with size comparison and the Dynamics that creates it’s enough to

Move entire worlds to a response affect the psychology of a civilization and move them to action which also makes it an incredible component for World building thematically rich and narratively compelling ladies and gentlemen for the benefit of your creative brains I give you giant monsters

We are about to talk a lot about World building and make a lot of interesting suggestions for ways that you could build your own but the truth is that World building is really hard so before we start if you’re interested in trying to World build for yourself I’d like you

To go try out campfire an online tool for World building and writing that will break the process down into manageable pieces for you it really does turn this whole thing from a daunting challenge into something that’s just really fun to get into a big thanks to them for

Sponsoring this video and giving us the opportunity to share something with you that I think will be really useful in making use of this whole video links in the description place a giant anything into a setting and it’s going to have some interesting effects make it a person and you end up

With some really bizarre interpersonal Dynamics cannibalism social hierarchies the reflection of the self all that fun stuff which we are almost certainly going to talk about in another video but make it something else something alive but not quite so much like you animals plants aliens even incarnations of Concepts

Well now it’s hard to know whether they’re really malicious it’s just sort of nature a sentient piece of nature one that could destroy you without a second thought that could end you and your way of life with ease perhaps without even noticing all on its own there are endless examples of this in

Fiction some of them are predatorial with an active animalistic drive to harm you the man-eating Titans from the anime Attack on Titan with their lacks empty expressions and malformed Silhouettes the alien Kaiju from the movie Pacific Rim pouring in from an interdimensional Rift in the ocean’s floor to destroy the

Human race some of these Giants are distinctly on the more benevolent side actually offering help to the world’s people in some fashion I particularly love the oddly adorable silt Striders from the third game in the Elder Scrolls franchise Morrowind immense imposing bugs that are docile enough to be used for what amounts to

Bus transit I also love the idea of the fabricated behemoths that Scott Westerfield invented for his Leviathan book series massive sea mammals Krakens jellyfish carefully bred and engineered to carry Humanity through the skies like fleshy zeppelins and that’s only one way that they’ve made use of them but it doesn’t have to

Go one way or the other they don’t have to be helpful or harmful necessarily they can also just be maybe they’re so far removed from the people who inhabit their world that they just can’t have an impact like the massive dinosaurs and insects and beasts of Skull Island in

King Kong maybe they have an inherent effect but it’s completely neutral and impossible to influence in any way whatsoever like atuin the world Turtle who carries the whole of Terry pratchett’s Discworld on its back whatever the role or temperament of your great beasties and there are bound to be

Many one thing is almost always guaranteed these things are going to create tension for the people who share their world and those people are almost always going to react to it there are honestly too many interesting ways authors have thought to approach these Dynamics to list here but I think

We found a tidy way to categorize them really how does anyone respond to tension they either try to resolve it ignore it or let it destroy them in this case I think we can put this pretty simply people forced to live with the tension that giant monsters bring

Are either going to compete with them cooperate with them or find a way to coexist with them pretty broad I know but wait until you see what these things look like when people do feel the need to compete with these massive organisms it’s generally because they feel a

Significant threat to their way of life and they’re making an effort to remove or reduce that threat this effort can result in a few different outcomes perhaps the people win it’s not inconceivable humans have done Wilder things in reality but it’s interesting to speculate about how or why this might

Happen especially given all the odd quirks of the Fantastical beasts they’re facing in these stories what do they do when their natural predator is no longer looming over them or when they’ve simply proven that they are the Apex species the card game magic the Gathering has a world setting called tarkir where Mighty

Dragons once competed with the native Clans for dominance but eventually the Clans rallied together and hunted all the dragons to Extinction now unchecked the Clans ravaged their world slaughtering each other in an attempt to claim and reclaim every square inch of land for themselves you can see the bones of dragons

Standing out on the horizon petrified features of the landscape something feels like it’s missing from this place part of the world’s magic has died spoiler eventually the dragons come back which is a welcome change of pace for anyone who’s been watching this channel for a while now but we are not talking

About that part here another possible outcome of this competition is well still pending results maybe the people can’t ever quite get the upper hand maybe the best they can do is struggle against a threat that is simply part of their world I like this one a lot because I think it

Requires the most ongoing ingenuity the inhabitants never get to just be done with the conflict they have to shape their entire world around it forever I mentioned Attack on Titan earlier it’s a great example of this because to keep away their huge hungry uncannily childlike Predators they’ve developed

Tools like an impossibly large set of protective perimeter walls as well as an apparatus that they call vertical maneuvering equipment which allows their military to at least sort of compete with the threat not really a solution per se but it’s something at least another example I really like also from

Magic the Gathering is the world of ikoria which is overflowing with huge dangerous unpredictable monsters to enjoy any kind of stability at all the peoples of this world have had to adapt and develop creative approaches to habitation massive walls and ranks of monster killing soldiers a mode of lava

And a City built into the side of a volcano and best of all in my opinion a floating city of balloons and aircraft designed to hang in the sky far above the dangers maybe none of these are ideal living conditions but they are at least living conditions one can only be so lucky

Or not because the last potential outcome of competing against a force like this that I can see is that you lose sometimes there is no recourse no meaningful way for the people to fight back sometimes the monsters they’re facing are just too powerful or too pervasive

And it’s all they can do just to eke out their pitiful existence if they even get to do that much this wasn’t really that easy for me to find examples of but I did find one very surprising and very interesting example in the book Wings of Fire by 2e.t

Sutherland we find a world where human civilization is essentially non-existent that’s because very much the opposite of tarkir dragons are the apex predators here and Humanity has become so insignificant they aren’t even known by a species name they’re just thought of as scavengers living off the scraps of dragon Society

And notice something here to these dragons but we would consider people are barely better than animals the dragons the giant monsters in this case become the people taking on that role as they dominate this world very interesting reversal but of course the picture doesn’t always

Have to be so Grim so polarized a vast difference in scale does not always lead to a vast competition sometimes it actually creates new promising possibilities make no mistake cooperation is still an interesting source of tension that leads to fascinating World building the question of how this of continuous

Relationship was formed and how it will be maintained if it is maintained is Rife with fascinating questions that the World Builder in you will probably race to answer the obvious connection here is what we’d refer to in ecological terms as mutualism both the people and the Monsters benefit from each other

This one is fairly simple compared to the others but I think the surrounding story of how and why this happened is definitely a worthy exploration in fact those very questions are one of my favorite things about the movie How to Train Your Dragon initially militant ready to murder any

Of these huge fire-breathing sheep stealing warrior-killing beasts that come to their lands the people of this world eventually realized that they actually share a similar conflict with the dragons an even bigger threat holding them under its control from here they form a bond using the equipment they initially created to kill

Dragons in order to fight alongside them now instead of being burnt to a crisp by dragon fire it’s one of their greatest tools I love that but it’s just so sweet almost saccharine and the cynical part of my mind wonders would this really be so balanced I find it much more likely

That the cooperation turns out to be a little more heavily weighed in favor of one party and I won’t mince words for all of their redeeming qualities humans aren’t exactly known for their capacity to treat nature fairly so I can certainly see a relationship far more akin to parasitism developing here my favorite

Example of this is probably something that occurs in China mievel’s amazing book the scar which has easily some of the coolest World building I’ve ever seen the floating city of armada made from thousands of boats connected by gangplanks and netting travels the sea very slowly by way of a fleet of

Tugboats not very efficient at all so what do they do they summon in Avant a mile long sea creature too large to exist comfortably in the Seas as they are which swims in and out of the inky depths of reality they bind it with thamaturgy in strange Sciences connected to an immense harness

And chain it to their city like a chariot and it works fabulously for them until it doesn’t the Avant isn’t made for this world it gets ill and dies its great corpse filling the sea with islands of fetid tissue and pus wild fascinating bizarre sad I loved every moment of it

It’s an outstanding demonstration of how exploitative people can be even in the face of the most majestic things their world has to offer so we have competitive Dynamics where the people Vie against these massive creatures for dominance leading to the creation of settings which would never have existed otherwise

We also have Cooperative relationships where the difference in scale is actually a source of enrichment and Worlds Collide into a new interesting harmonious setting provided they can just be a little less opportunistic for a hot second but those are only the good and the bad here really it doesn’t have to be either

As I said earlier sometimes they simply coexist which in its own way also creates a surprisingly large amount of tension because the possibility is always there no matter how removed these creatures are how ambivalent that difference in scale is impossible to ignore the knowledge that just one of these things

Could destroy you and everything you love without much thought at all no way not to be moved by that and if you do see it as a potential source of power if only you could get your hands on it figure out how to harness it that thought will probably haunt you for as

Long as you share the same world which in its own way also creates a surprisingly large amount of tension I mentioned Skull Island near the start of the video it’s actually a great demonstration of this concept because it is separate it is far removed it’s a wonder a myth it’s fascinating and

Intriguing and the dinosaurs and beasts even King Kong himself we find out would certainly wreak havoc on mankind if they could but they can’t on the flip side it may also be this isolation from Humanity that’s allowed the island to thrive in this way but that distance cannot last

Humans cannot know about this thing stand in awe of it and simply sit with that tension they have to go to the island bring back a prize and we all know how that turns out the tension is palpable from the moment we first hear about Skull Island and

It’s more than a curiosity about the unknown sometimes that kind of intervention is literally impossible though as I also mentioned near the start Autumn the world turtle from Terry pratchett’s Discworld carries the entire planet or disc that is on its back and that’s about it on occasion it

Protects the disc from meteorites with its flippers and Beak and is careful to swim through the cosmos gently but is otherwise so far removed from the happenings upon the disc itself that the denizens hardly even know anything about it at all and there’s a Majesty in that something about a creature this size

This much vastly larger existing in the same reality as you that you just can’t ignore that itself is a piece of the setting the very presence of a creature like this enriches and mystifies the world and in an interesting way I think these fictional behemoths do the same thing for you the audience

Even though they’re not really a part of your world I think they call upon something that is very real I mentioned how small they make you feel right at the video Start that’s true but I think it’s more than that as well in watching all these different people

Struggle against this as a threat draw on it as a source of power look upon it as a living Wonder Don’t You also begin to feel what these characters must be feeling the knowledge buried deep beneath your sense of self beneath your tribalism toward your species beneath your anthropocentric perspective that

You are not the Center of Your World yes Humanity has clawed its way to dominance but that doesn’t mean the world belongs to you you as a species have just become the predatory Behemoth to the things smaller than you you are but one thing in an amazingly complex planetary system

The world is not yours and these creatures remind you of that and honestly the world is far more interesting from that perspective as we’ve seen now the question is how will you harness that what ideas does this give you and how are you going to build your own worlds from them

It’s kind of a big question though isn’t it really how does anyone just make a world if you don’t already have a lot of experience doing it it can be a pretty monstrous task but it really doesn’t have to be like all art this should be fun and I know a

Great way to make sure that happens there’s an online tool called campfire that will change everything for you it’s such an easy Carefree experience instead of worrying about the Monumental big picture of the thing you can break it all down into bits and pieces and just

Make the parts of the thing that you really want to make think of it like a big toolbox that just makes everything manageable for you you can use it to build character sheets timelines relationship webs it even has a manuscript editor that lets you reference all your notes while you write

If that weren’t enough they also have a huge number of learning resources to teach you about the craft as well as an entire platform to share your work on and get it discovered if that’s what you want if not don’t worry it’s Totally Secure only the people you choose to

Share your work with will see it you can create an account for free and get access to everything right from the start but if you want to expand into bigger projects campfire can help you with that too they let you pay only for the features you absolutely need which

Means you can start a subscription for as low as 25 cents per month if you want you can also pay a one-time upfront price if you don’t feel like paying for a subscription visit the link in the description and use code TF to get 20 off your membership it’s truly one of

The most accommodating tools I’ve ever found and it really turns what could be a massive daunting process into something fun and simple again visit the link in the description and use code TF to get 20 off your lifetime membership so there you have it all the tension created by these gigantic Predators

Benevolent Giants towering Wonders of the World the ways in which the inhabitants of the world compete with them or cooperate or coexist so many interesting possibilities so many still to explore tell us what you come up with in the comments it’ll still be a week before our next

Upload so in the meantime I oh dear that’s not good um keep making stuff up leave comments you know what to do I have to go deal with this hey stop don’t touch that Foreign