I think the “Stop trying to restart ancient empires you god damn bastards” lesson might in fact be mainly historical. The sheer number of people who’ve been killed by maniacs trying to get back Rome and Alexander’s Greece alone might give any sane person pause.
To be fair, most of those people simply looked at those guys and went 'Cool, so if I kill my neighbours I can get stuff!' without looking into how those empires were built and maintained. Rome in particular has a lot of interesting features, like how it was the first civilization to have citizenship both something that can be earned by non-Romans and is valuable to obtain, which led to a lot of foreigners serving the Empire to their highest capacity in the hopes of some social mobilization. Meanwhile the latest guy with plans for a new Rome, Mussolini, had nothing but trouble with the lands he conquered before. I'm not saying we should go back to an era where you'd be left rotting on a wooden bar simply because you were at the wrong place at the wrong time, I'm not part of Caesar's Legion, but the Roman Empire was a magnificent achievement with a lot of nifty features that we should consider adapting for modern times, and in fact, already have borrowed a lot of stuff from.
@@the_tactician9858 Hell, Alexander himself was a case of exactly that. The guy wanted to imitate Cyrus' empire (with himself at the top), but only got to the conquering part. And so, as soon as he died, the empire fractured in a gigantic civil war.
@@samuelpoveda7853 That's why I never mentioned the guy, because he was exactly like you said, all conquest, no ruling. Which, mind you, is still impressive, but I still like his father better for actually giving Alex the tools he could use for such a trip. And yes, Alexander did nothing to integrate the empire, and with his death it pretty much disintegrated instead. Then again, he was at least smart enough to present himself as a pharao to the Egyptians, so Ptolemaic Egypt was probably the last time Egypt actually went through a golden age of sorts.
A lot of those people who want to revive the old empires are also quietly admiring the unjust hierarchies of those eras, and that a lot of minority groups were heavily oppressed.
@@leviadragon99 More like the other way around, I feel... bigots always use the past to justify their opinions on hating their group of choice, elevating their nation's glorious past and handily forgetting that which doesn't make their dream look good, like how Roman culture borrowed many things from other regions and cultures. Though, I will admit that Venn diagram is a lot tighter than I like to see
In a mind blowing facts thread on reddit someone pointed out that ancient egypt lasted so long that there where egyptian archaeologists and historians studying early ancient egypt during what we consider to still be ancient egypt. My world history class was terrible. Facts like that really put time into perspective.
Cleopatra is closer to us than she is to the building of the Gaza Pyramids. The Pyramids were to the Romans as the Romans are to us: ancient history, works of a "dead" civilization, ancestors to the current. Egypt is old, VERY old. One of the cradles of civilization..
when playing Assasins Creed origins: the pyramids you visit are thousends of years old some of the old temples that are burried in sand are super ancient
@@colt9836 Hell, even if you don't count Cleopatra (cause that was a Greek dynasty) the last native Egyptian ruler Nectanebo II was about halfway between our time and the building of the great pyramids. Not to mention that those don't even go back to the earliest dynasties of Egypt. Egyptian civilization is so old that mammoths were still alive at the same time as ancient Egypt, and IIRC the beginnings of the civilization may have been brought on by people fleeing the drying Sahara to go to the fertile Nile river.
So, you know the Shelley poem _Ozymandias,_ about how the power of human tyrants is nothing against that of just lots of time? Well, Ozymandias is the Greek name for Ramses II, and one of his sons was the first Ancient Egyptian Egyptologist, which is just the sort of fantastic neatness that you’d decry as contrived if it happened in fiction.
Shoutout to Hollow Knight for being "Oops, All Precursors." - Hallownest - The Snail Shamans - The Moths - The Spiders in Deepnest - The bees, kinda? - Whatever was going on with the void in the Abyss - The Godseekers' original home - Everything the Grimm Troupe ate
Playing Hollow Knight rn and came to the comments to see if someone else would mention it LOL I find it all very interesting and breathtaking but also a little confusing time line wise lol (abt halfway thru the game)
My favorite precursors thing is that TV Tropes has a page for "Neglectful Precursors" (who leave dangerous stuff lying around for no reason). On the page there are all the usual folders ("Films", "Literature", "Video Games"), but in addition to "Live Action TV", the Stargate franchise gets its OWN FOLDER, because the Ancients just left THAT MUCH poorly-labeled dangerous technology lying around.
Now, to be completely fair to such precursors, humanity would absolutely create a bunch of dangerous stuff, forget to label it, and simply move directly on to make more dangerous stuff. Just think about how much gets lost in the mail on a daily basis, now imagine the mail is like nuclear power cells or something.
@@RustBot42 Now include the fact that we store nuclear waste with symbols whose meaning will be lost to time and tada, Humans leaving random dangerous materials that is unlabelled.
@@minitntman1236 The issue of labeling nuclear waste for millennia's to come is actually taken very seriously, messages of varying complexity in a lot of different languages, mostly as technical information for a similarly advanced civilisation to be able to pickup the work of finding a less hazardous solution, stored onto various physical formats such has sapphire CDs (has well has instructions on what a CD is and how it works), and tablets with very tiny text on them, readable with simple lenses. And has a less informative but more direct deterrent, the area around these sites are to be covered in a thick concrete slab with large spikes making the area barren of ressources and largely inhabitable, to avoid people settling there and accidentally digging into the nuclear storage. As well as pictograms ofc, as an in-between measure. We know what archeology and deciphering ancient languages is like, so we can make the job easier for future civilisations.
@@minitntman1236I think the symbol of a black angel against the background of a golden halo means these things contain holy relics left here by god for us to find.
@@bombkangaroo "This place is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here. What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. " Oh, that's exactly what you'd put on a place to that's definitely full of valuable shit! Get digging.
This and their Journey to the west videos. Ive been watching theses videos since i was in highschool and can safely say they have drastically helped me in my writing endeavors.
That opening monologue got me thinking, “We are, each of us, a multitude. I am not the man I was this morning, nor the man of yesterday. I am a throng of myself queued through time. We are, gentle reader, each a crowd within a crowd.”
Huh, never heard of that book series before. It's not quite Whitman's "I contain multitudes" or Heraclitus' "No man ever steps in the same river twice," but it's pretty good.
@@Duiker36 To be fair, I haven't read/heard of it either. The Carl Sagan version "And you are made of a hundred trillion cells. We are, each of us, a Multitude." didn't fit right in this context and I discovered this alternate quote which I liked more.
One of my favorite 'what happened to the precursors' reveals in fiction is Halo. Humanity finds an ancient, planet-sized megastructure and travels to its surface - only to find no trace of its creators. You find yourself wondering who built this thing, why it exists, what its purpose is. Then you find a dark facility in the middle of a murky swamp, and are in no way prepared for the horrors that await you within. By the time you realize what you've actually found, it's too late. It's a prison. And you just opened it.
@@vaniellysthe precursors are not humanities ancestors in both 343 and bungie lore, In bungie lore the precursors don’t exist and its the forerunners which are the ancestors of humanity, in 343 lore the precursors are multiversal God like beings that like playing games with species by evolving them and then absorbing their experiences through the flood at a later time, in this canon the forerunners are also not humanities ancestors and are a completely different race
This line from jak and daxter goes hard: “I have spent my life searching for the answers that my father, and my father's fathers, failed to find. Who were the Precursors? Why did they create the vast monoliths that litter our planet? How did they harness eco, the life energy of the world? What was their purpose, and why did they vanish? I have asked the plants, but they do not remember. The plants have asked the rocks, but the rocks do not recall-even the rocks do not recall.”
Turns out the Rocks did know and told the Plants, but the Plants thought the Rocks were pulling a fast one on them and didn't tell Samos what they said.
That is some HP Lovecraft type lore right there. Reminds me of him describing the nameless city, where he says it's too old for Babylon to remember or something like that.
The precursors from the Jak & Daxter series have always fascinated me. Even when a face is put to them, the game does a good job of maintaining their mysteriousness.
There’s a ruin of a tiny ancient Byzantine church on the islet of Daskalio, right off Keros in the Lesser Cyclades. It was probably used in the 7th or 8th century, one and a half thousand years ago. Being so ancient, it’s completely fallen apart since, an almost incomprehensibly old structure that it would be absolutely surreal to stand within. It’s built on the very top of a steep hill, and it’s made out of marble from the nearby island of Naxos. But the Romans didn’t import the marble: they pulled it out of the ground from the barely visible ruins that were _already there._ Because in the Bronze Age, _three thousand years before them,_ Daskalio was inhabited by a thriving Cycladic religious settlement. Imagine being a Roman stepping onto that hill and beholding the abyss of time and feeling so, so small. Ancient Precursors are my absolute favorite fictional trope because they’re _real._
One of my favorite footnotes in that vein: Sardinia used to be a major military power in the Mediterranean. Yeah, SARDINIA... the ancient ruins on Sardinia make even the Pyramids look easy to build.
This is but one example. Xenophon wrote in the Anabasis that as the ten thousand were marching north, they came across two ruined cities. Xenophon describes them as bigger and greater than any city still standing, and thus, overcome with curiosity, he spent the next few days asking the locals about the ruins. But the locals had no knowledge of who built the cities or why they were destroyed. It took more than two thousand years before we found the answers to Xenophon's questions.
@@InRealTime769I think she once mentioned in a live stream that there were certain types of games she doesn’t enjoy playing…. And unfortunately ffxiv falls under one of those types….
Makes me think of a quote from an SCP short story called _Document Recovered From The Marianas Trench_ : “Don't let them hide us. Try and find more, I know there's got to be more people who tried to leave something behind. Don't let the world die in vain. Remember us.”
I like it when the ancient precursor is just like... the previous generation. Like asking your dad what life was before the end times or even just finding out that the teachers used to be the delinquents. Huge monumental changes in relatively small amounts of time that just happen to be larger than your life span.
Shortly before a second grade teacher of mine retired, I heard a group of second graders complaining about a weird rule she had. I was glad to explain that she made that rule because of something I did thirteen years ago. They didn't believe m; so I explained that you had to leave your pencil at the top of the worksheet unless you were writing in the answer spot was because I doodled on the worksheets and threw a pencil at a kid who called me names.
Splatoon did this trope pretty well. Ever since the first game it was clear that the setting is on Earth thousands of years after an apocalypse, making us humans the "ancient precursors". This also made people ask the question, if the humans are gone, how did sea creatures evolve to such closely resemble them both in anatomy and culture? Splatoon 3 ended up answering that question with "they all got embedded with liquid crystals containing the hopes and dreams of a bunch of human survivors and that fast tracked their evolution". It's a lot more poignant than my shitty summary I swear.
It also ties in with the fact that a lot of the modern day threats are from humans and their actions. The great flood that started the Great Turf War is from humans fucking up the planet, Tartar is an AI made by humans, and Grizz is a bear directly from the humans last attempt to survive.
13:20 Aw man, my favorite detail from the Lord of the Rings is that we get a bunch of monologues about how the descendents of Numenor are of a purer, fairer, morally superior character which has alas been slow-dwindled by contact and intermarriage with non-numenorians, but everyone who says that is Gondorian, one of the ancestor peoples of Numenor, and all of the characters alive during the Fall like Gandalf and Elrond give some varient of "Moral race my ass, they live longer than other humans and that's about it". Just a great contrast if you're paying attention
It gets even better when you look at the history of Numenor and realize that they were slowly starting to get hubristic and ethno-centric about halfway through their runtime, loyalty to the Valar and friendship with the Elves started turning into a small cult rather than the norm, and Sauron's whispers were only the straw that broke the back of their survival. Also when you consider that the lifespan of Gondorians were on a steady downward slope largely unaffected by that same intermarriage they're so scared of. Just look at the king who was born to a woman of Rohan. His natural lifespan was no different from his cousins, yet the assumption sparked an entire civil war that had the end result of everyone (in high society) being scared to have more than 2 children or risk another "Kinstrife", as if a high birthrate was anywhere close to the reason for it.
Elrond especially gives off "disappointed family member" vibes when it comes to Numenor, which is fitting because he's the *insert number of greats* uncle of their entire royal family.
@@anjetto1 I think the group that founded Gondor is the same group that became the Numenoreans, but I could be remembering wrong and they just meant descendants.
Love me some Mass Effect The Reapers: Not only did we wipe out your precursors, we wiped out your precursors precursors back through infinity. Shepard: *dabs in RGB*
The Reapers' Precursors: Yeah, they didn't get us all, but as far as we're concerned they actually deserve to do their thing, so we're just gonna sit down here in this puddle for the rest of time and watch the cycles go by.
And also: All that cool stuff you found? They didn't even make that, we did! They just discovered it. As did their precursors and their precursors and so on. And whenever the time comes to wipe out all those pesky organics, we just have to go where we left all the space travel things to find them.
I love that the Reapers are so terrifying because they're essentially the answer to the question of "what if the Bronze Age Collapse happened on purpose"? They are the very death of civilizations, embodied in robot space squids. Granted, the given reason for WHY they do this is rather unsatisfying, but the very idea of them is still one of the reasons why Mass Effect works so well. "You exist because we allow it, and you will end because we demand it."
@@thirdcoinedge The strategy game Stellaris has something like that, in the form of the Contingency, which periodically destroy all advanced civilisations to prevent some unspecified disaster that would somehow be worse than them. And given that another way to "win" the game is to blow up the galaxy to ascend your civilisation to become beings of pure thought....they might have a point.
20 seconds later a kid smashes through his cart of kryptonian cabbages. "My cabbages! Okay, NOW this day cannot get any worse!" -Same Guy, about to be proven wrong, AGAIN
i think hollow knight has one of the most fascinating takes with precursors. the entire setting is that of a fallen and dying kingdom, all remnants of it being the lone survivors of a calamitous infection that was in part due to an even older religious sect that got erased by the current dying kingdom, which that old religious sect quite possibly also shut down an even OLDER mysterious civilzation whose ruins and influence are throughout the entire game and so little is known about them that it becomes so interesting
It's also incorrect. These days it's closer to 20% taking notes from Tolkien, 35% taking notes from people who took notes from Tolkien, and 25% taking notes from people who took notes from people who took notes from Tolkien.
Fun Tolkien Fact: "The Fall of Numenor" could also be said as "The Fall of Man". "The Fall of Man" would be translated into Elven by combining the words "Man"/"Atan" and "To Have Fallen"/"Lante" into the compound term "Atalante". Tolkien did love his puns.
@@johnathanmonsen6567 Considering Tolkien's biggest gimmick is Linguistics, I'd say it was, in fact, I'm pretty sure his world was made to explain Elven then he just got really into it
@@GoblinLord afaik that's pretty much exactly what happened, he invented the languages first and then ironed out a world with people who spoke them. Which is exactly my type of nerd xD
The fact that the Numenoreans were originally Tolkien's attempt at a future sci fi story because C.S. Lewis challenged him to write one but then was retooled to be in middle earths past is so funny to me because he did the ancient alien precursor trope AND the Atlantis trope with one people. A two for one deal. I guess when in the ancient tales of the silmarillion ancient people "flew on ships in the sky" its a 50/50 shot on whether there were magic ships or space ships. Both interpretations could be plausibly correct.
I can't remember where he wrote it, but apparently at one point Tolkien played with the idea that the Numenoreans were industrialized and their ships were like modern tankers with steel hulls and coal/gas powered.
I’m pretty glad he didn’t considering “fantasy plus industrial revolution” is virtually everywhere, even to a decent extent in Tolkien’s world. Having that stuff would be a distraction from the folklore and it fits better with Numenor being another rich and fantastical place whose disappearance leads to a somewhat less fantastic new age, akin to what happens with the elves in RotK.
My favourite approach to “Ascended Precursors” comes in Iain M. Banks’ Culture books. Wherein it’s just a thing that advanced galactic civilisations tend to do, some of them leave behind boobytrapped toys, and most of the galaxy is annoyed that the Culture themselves haven’t got around to ascending because they’re inveterate busybodies.
@@cerandor23 in the Culture’s defense, they have reasons to think that /something/ is hinky with the whole ascension business, and in fact created a Mind whose whole job it was to ascend, then descend again to tell them what was going on on the Higher Planes (since the Ascended tend to be kinda tight-lipped about the whole business). When said Mind came back completely and irrevocably insane, then immediately committed self-deletion, the Culture rather sensibly decided that this whole “ascension” business probably wasn’t for them.
Loved that you did this video, but kinda sad that my favorite use of this trope got left out - the "Fling a Light Into The Future" Trope, where the precursors know they're screwed and leave tools and messages for whoever comes next so that they can succeed where they failed. SCP-1281 is a great example of this.
"...Sometimes (the lesson) is to unbury (the past), take notes about the arrangement of its body, and then try not to die the same way." That's another OSP quote going into the increasingly crowded rent-free spaces in our heads.
“Zero Dawn is not a super-weapons program. And it will not save us.” The absolute chills that line gives me every time. Horizon’s Faro Plague to this day remains my favorite apocalypse in fiction.
It also recontextualizes all the messages found from soldiers fighting the plague. They were brave, willing to sacrifice themselves... and in a way they were betrayed by the "good guys". All of them belived humanitys best are working on last minute superweapon that will save everyone. That they are just buying time for completion. It's kinda as if in Mass Effect the "give up and walk away" ending was CANON. Like yeah you are Shepard, you fought and beaten the odds countless times and all of it amounted to... you will die. everyone you know and love will die. But one day there will be new humans.
The scene where Faro deletes Apollo was also pretty kino if I remember well. The story is always strongest when it does something Faro-adjacent and forbidden west continued it in what I thought was a very satisfying and unnerving way. I actually don’t care all that much about the main characters but the lore bits are damn good.
I think my favorite interpretation of the question “should the old ways be brought back” was in the ATLA comic “the Promis”, where the whole “Everything he knows is gone” part of Aangs character comes into play. The poor kid ends up getting hit in the face with the knowledge that his people are dead and his entire culture might die with him at some point. Aang ends up trying to navigate the complexities of keeping old traditions alive but also letting them adapt to the new situations and era at hand. Basically the conclusion was that there’s nothing wrong with honoring the old ways, but because of the nature of change, sometimes you’ll have to let a few things go, and there’s nothing wrong with that either
Speaking of The Promise, I think a great detail is in the beginning, where Aang mentions he doesn't remember _why_ they had this holiday, it's "just the way things are". And, yeah, that really hits. Aang was still a kid when the Air Nomads were genocided. He probably did not yet understand every little complexity of his culture, as most children do. And now that knowledge is lost to time, because he's the only survivor.
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ATLA mention quota for the Trope Talk episode reached.
@@danzoomIt’s a wonderful show and does a lot of things right imo. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately to others) it’s brought up a lot when people reference stuff like tropes or certain stereotypes in fiction. Whether that’s a good or bad thing is ultimately up to you.
0:46 This is essentially the definition of my favorite word: "sonder." It's the feeling that comes with making this realization and just having it in mind. As you said, it's not something we can think about all the time, so it's just a temporary feeling like any other emotion. Giving these more specific and hard-to-put-your-finger-on emotions is really interesting. There are so many out there, waiting to be found and used by someone who is feeling them and wants to give it a name to better understand it.
That's why I fell in love with Dune saga (and no, I got into it before the movie). Herbert set the universe a huge leap ahead of time making present us the precursors.He mentions the advancement of science, culture, religion and even concept of humankind and how everything almost collapsed due to either robots going rogue or space HRE shenanigans. Also I find it really funny to call french "an ancient, complex dialect"
-Ah , so the Necrons/Techo-mummies are the precursors ? -No , that would be the Old Ones , the Necrons are like , , that grumpy grampa of the galaxy that yells to us to "Get off there lawn" , wielding de-atomizing shotguns .
To be fair 40k is basically oops all precursers all the way down. The aeldari and drukhari have the old eldar empire to look to, the necrons are as you said precursors themselves, and the imperium is unique in that they precursored themselves twice, the dark of technology humanity and then imperium of the 31st millennium.
Ah the Necrons, the only faction in the setting that actually has a permanent viable solution to the whole chaos problem and GW is too busy shilling astartes to care.
@@friarnausk5586I mean, the tyranids have a pretty good solution to that themselves. It's called "OM NOM NOM NOM!". Can't feed the warp and chaos if there's nothing left to feed them.....because you ate it all already
@@friarnausk5586 I'd say GW is too busy shilling chaos to care that there are many factions that can deal with chaos. The Necrons removing the martial from the inmaterial effectively killing anything in either that relies on both to survive. The shadow of the warp bugs break chaos on a metaphysical level and even the Votann computers remember dark age technology that can cover souls making them not interact with the warp. Hard counters aside, the Krork were able to body the Old Ones thus it stands to reason they could do the same to the chaos gods if the chaos gods were awake when the Krock were around. The elves of fantasy were able to 99% kill a chaos god when they finally pulled their heads out of their asses so I would assume if they eldar got their shit together they could figure something out. Really the only reason the chaos gods seem so scary is because of how young and pathetic us humans are. To us humans they are ancient precursors but quite a few 40k factions still see chaos as a recent addition and as new kids on the block.
Warhammer 40K has basically every flavour of precursor. The Old Ones got bipped by the Necrons and the C’Tan, who are still around and only just waking up alongside their technology that is so incomprehensibly advanced it’s easier to explain how actual literal magic works. The Eldar were created by the Old Ones, founded a massive empire after the war in heaven, then got bipped by their own depravity and decadence which created Slaanesh. The Krorks, also created by the Old Ones, devolved into the Orks, who unlike the the other 3, didn’t leave behind any ancient cities or relics because Orks are utterly transient, and only the orkish culture remains because it’s hard coded into their biology, and their biology remains because the Old Ones made them really hard to truly get rid of.
Don’t forget that the precursor civilization humanity has the most contact with is also humanity. People desperately cling to the shards of devices and templates that their ancestors created, mythologizing them because they can’t really understand the principles that their own civilization’s previous state mastered. I’ve always enjoyed the interaction between the immediate need for every trace of old human knowledge the imperium can get to deal with the *very very immediate problems oh god THEY’RE HERE* and the reality that depending on old scraps prevents them from making genuine scientific progress on their own, to reach the heights they had made it to before. For the life of me I can’t remember the book but it is at one point revealed that the Arks Mechanicus contain sentient ai, full stc sets and weaponry so advanced it can reverse the targets’ flow of time. And the mechanicus just has no idea how to access any of this is right under their noses but *this is what humanity was capable of* and could be again.
@@catalyst9955 was about to say- the Imperium is frequently discovering advanced technology beyond their understanding that was created by _themselves._
I've been toying with a spin on the Precursor trope where their downfall turns out to have been a memory wipe inflicted upon them in a war where even their allies decided they were taking things too far. The precursors aren't "gone"; they're all still there, they just don't realize that the ancient abandoned ruins they've been studying, dismantling, and reverse-engineering for the tech and magic on which they found their civilization belonged to them to begin with.
In a lot of ways, this is what Halo did. The deep lore of Halo gets really weird. Not to discourage you. This is still a really fun idea and definitely a good one to explore
This is such a cool idea because of the spin it puts on real world archeology. The reason we get ancient aliens type thoughts about past civilizations and cultures is because someone decided that human development must be liner and we-the-now, must therefor be better and more advanced than we-the-then. Current archeology is growing out of this hangup it started with and that's all to the good imo, but early archeology fan-fic about ancient civilizations is wild and I love it. Best of luck with your writing!! I'm excited for how it turns out.
one thing that a show did to answer "what happened to the precursors?" is pretty interestingly done in Heroic age, where its mentioned in the first minutes of the first episode, that the precursors straight up left to another universe and challenged the lesser races to come find them.
and then these races immediately started shit because they couldn't agree who is the new Precursor lol Good show, though. Main music theme from the into is absolutely epically glorious
My favorite example of this is in FromSoft games, since you are often looking at the lost artifacts of a fallen society (and using those artifacts to beat up its last remnants). The lore of a FromSoft game is often trying to piece together exactly why this particular society beefed it so hard that everyone became zombies or whatever.
I like how Souls lore goes from as deep and obscure as "crumbling civilizations, Gods overthrowing dragons in turn overthrown by undead in turn overthrown by age of darkness all in the name of staving off heat death and embracing the duality of creation..." ... To "this wizards name is Big Hat Logan. Guess why."
In Dr. Stone, modern day humans are the ancient precursors when everybody in the entire world turned into stone. To the primitive people, modern day science and technology is like sorcery to them, they've never even seen materials like glass, iron or paper before, so they fear it. All they know is something turned those people into stone, they got stories and legends to go on but that's it. Our hero, Senku uses his scientific reasoning to figure out the mystery of what happened to his civilization 3700 years ago.
I love the references to the dwemer of elder scrolls. "Incomprehensible bull" is very succinct in describing them, especially when the most widely supported theory is that they all simultaneously thought themselves out of existence immediately after flipping the on switch of their artificial god.
"thought themselves out of existence immediately after flipping the on switch on their artificial god" makes me immediately think about the death of art because of a flood of AI plagiarism machines. XD
It's not _necessarily_ any more supported than them ascending or being transmuted into the skin of the Brass God. From what we -- and notably, basically none of the actual characters in the Elder Scrolls universe itself -- can figure, if they had actually zero-summed (the term for that kind of "thinking themselves out of existence") then they would have been erased from existence a whole lot more comprehensively. (And yes, that _is_ actually possible, from also erasing all memory of them, all the way to making it so they had never existed at all.) Elder Scrolls lore gets weirder and less certain the deeper you dig. So... yeah, pretty incomprehensible. A very large part of the point of the Dwemer is that we don't and can't know exactly what happened to them, I'd argue. There's not actually a definite answer, on purpose.
@@jemolk8945 you are absolutely correct. Every possible answer for the dwemer does have some sort of hole in it somewhere, including all the in-universe theories. I can't remember where I found it (and for all I know it was Michael Kirkbride who said it and he technically isn't a writer anymore) but the Dwemer were intentionally written to be impossible to figure out. The only reason I say most widely accepted is because most TH-camrs in the TES fandom and the guy who did the New Whirling School website seem to accept it as the main explanation for their disappearance.
@@daltonfreeman6551 True -- but I think that is, in itself, less an indication of what's most reasonable to believe (as suggested by "best supported"), and more an indication that a lot of people, including in the TES fandom, are really, _really_ uncomfortable with ambiguity being what we're left with, and this was the answer they found easiest to rationalize as "best." People tend to prefer concrete answers -- even when the thing they're looking at makes it clear that none can exist. For my part, I prefer to headcanon that they succeeded, and ascended -- but I recognize that this is just headcanon, and no more concretely true than any other idea. I just personally prefer what I can draw from that version of the story. I therefore consciously choose to lean most heavily on the evidence for this interpretation -- and find it rather annoying when that gets ignored in favor of a consensus that is, to be fair, no _worse_ supported, but also no better, being _the_ explanation rather than merely _an_ explanation.
Thanks for including a couple halo clips in here. Their lore is so tied up in precursors that they have several precursor species, one of which is called precursors.
@Dervalanana i don't remember exactly. She doesn't actually talk about Halo, just has some background images from the Halo animated films in montage. I wanna say it was towards the end.
@@afkathisguy hmm, only thing I'm seeing are some horizon zero dawn images. Though I can see how the holoprojection there could be mistaken for cortana or another halo AI edit: ah, 2D animation. nvm
I feel like it would be interesting if you did a trope talk episode on the "Heroes don't kill" trope, just because it's a trope that I feel everyone has opinion on and it's one that as a very wide history to it.
I think "I don't like to do that/I'm afraid to" and "I hold unto personal ideals I want to uphold for myself" are reasons enough that should be understood.
Here’s my stance: If a dog has Rabies, no amount of love or compassion is going to make it better, and refusing to put down a rabid dog is a danger to yourself and everyone nearby. But with that being said, you shouldn’t take joy in putting down a rabid dog, this was a creature that through no fault of it’s own has lost control of faculties and communal instincts and is now violently lashing out people that could have been part of its pack or family. So putting down a Rabid dog should be done with dignity it deserves, because putting down a rabid dog is about keeping people safe, not a hate of rabid dogs. With that being said, a dog that bites isn’t always Rabid and hopefully with time can be made better. If you’re actively looking out for dogs to put down and getting upset when a dog doesn’t have rabies and was trained by an abusive owner, and gets taken away by animal welfare to be rehabilitated, maybe you should check if you’re not foaming at the mouth yourself. Also, if you’re dealing with a rabid dog, call animal control, because they’re professionals and are supposed to handle rabid dogs, not you, rabid dog hunting vigilante.
Wait, didn't they already make something like that? Actually, I think it might have just been mentioned as part of their batman detail diatribe. If I'm remembering right.
The ascended being trope always reminds me of the Taoist Immortal fashion trend in the 3rd to 6th centuries AD in China. Various "elixirs" - mixtures of toxic metals and mushrooms - were taken to allow the spirit to become "Immortal", leaving behind that pesky mortal shell. Descriptions sometimes included what a disgusting mess was left when friends finally found the physical husk that was left behind. The metal poisoning didn't bother the maggots, apparently.
Outer Wilds is my favorite example of a precursor civilization, because all the Nomai are individuals and you can track their personal arcs rather than them all being faceless ancestors spoilers: It's also an interesting case of the 4th type of precursors, those that get struck by a huge calamity. The Nomai weren't really hubristic, in fact they were survivors of a crash. The rest of Nomai civilization is still alive at the end of the game, and it's only the ruins of one clan that we explore in game. They had highly advanced tech, but they never got anywhere near where they were before and had to rebuild everything from the ground up. Their tale is one of survival and persistence that nevertheless got trumped by the cosmos. It wasn't their fault. That's just how things go.
I think their story is even anti-hubristic. If Eskall had just waited like five minutes before warping to the signal they would never have crashed and subsequently wiped out by the Interloper but then they would never have given us the tools to observe the Eye to make a new universe. In a sense, their "hubris" was the right thing to do in the end, even if they never knew.
Exploring the homes of the Nomai, learning the context that they're all dead and them learning about the end before perishing makes listening to their theme hit harder. It's all very sad. Allthough (SPOILER), you can find a suviving Nomai who were stuck on a hidden planet. She even joins you during the end.
Spoilers for both OG Outer Wilds and the Echoes of the Eye DLC: This all makes a very great deal of sense, because one of Outer Wilds' themes is that all things end, but each end is not *the* end. Each participant can (and should!) pass the torch to the next, and make something beautiful, despite the individual's not surviving to see it.
There's two moments that made me love the Nomai as people. One is a terrible joke made by one of the apprentices in Timber Hearths core mine. The other is a Nomai grieving over the loss of their partner in Brittle Hollow. Both of them made them so relatable, even with such advanced technology. And I can't think of any other game that does that.
Shoutout to that time a Disney Junior show did this! In Elena of Avalor, the main characters live in in the Hispanic-inspired kingdom of Avalor, but there are many ruins and relics from the ancient, indigenous South American-coded civilisation of Maru. The Maruvians were a prosperous society with advanced magical abilities. Now they're extinct. How did that happen? Surely not colonialism and genocide on the Avaloran ancestors' part? Nope, this is Disney Jr, it's not nearly that bad. The people all just died to save the world from eldritch horrors! The Shadows of the Night, as the Maruvians called them, are evil spirits/gods (one of them can literally control time) who invaded the nation to conquer and destroy it. The best sorcerer was able to banish them back to their home dimension - not kill, injure or depower them in any way, just relocate them - but it required such a strong spell that the entire human populace was "sent to the spirit realm" as collateral damage. That's how powerful these villains are. We learn this from the sorcerer's ghost, before Princess Elena finally lets her soul pass on by sealing off the magical crystal she's been guarding. The one she used to accidentally KILL HER OWN PEOPLE. Naturally, the Shadows return in the series finale and the heroes have to defeat them without killing everyone. There's even a Maruvian survivor revealed near the end. I love the series because despite the young target demographic, it integrates a number of deep, dark and emotional tropes like this very well.
“There had been uncountable kings, empires, inventions, billions of lives lived in millions of countries, monarchies, democracies, oligarchies, anarchies, ages of chaos and ages of order, pantheon upon pantheon of gods, infinite wars and times of peace, incessant discoveries and forgettings, innumerable horrors and triumphs, an endless repetition of unceasing novelty. What is the use of trying to describe the flowing of a river at any one moment, and then at the next moment, and then at the next, and the next? You wear out. You say: There is a great river, and it flows through this land, and we have named it History” -Ursula K LeGuin
*Technically*, when the Númenoreans invaded Valinor, the gods (Valar) actually worried that the invasion of paradise was going to work, so they surrendered their active guardianship of the world. It was capital-G God (Eru Illúvatar) who killed the army, sank Númenor, and made the world round. This was known as the Akallabêth, "Downfall", or (of course) Atalantë in Quenya. ...Real subtle, Professor Tolkien.
@harmonic1012 To be fair, he was writing his whole story from the invented voice of "I translated this from an ancient chronicle myths" so it would make sense for a version of the Atlantis myth to show up somewhere. Still, it's one of the few cases of Tolkien going "I'm trying to make this as obvious I possibly can".
It wasn't being subtle. The original version is called The Lost Road and was explicitly intended to be an Atlantis story. It was basically rejected by Allen and Unwin for not being a good follow-up after The Hobbit. It was a *time travel* story.
And true to form, his buddy C.S Lewis tossed any pretense to subtlety out the window and just said "Atlantis, or Numenor as it was called" in the last book of his Space Trilogy.
I love that Tolkien just couldn't get the time travel aspect to work - not with The Lost Road, not with The Notion Club Papers. He was almost incapable, it seems, of writing "not Middle-earth".
As far as I remember, the term "Atalante" was a complete accident. Numenor of course is a spin on the Atlantean myth, but Tolkien really wanted to be more subtle. However, by the time he wrote that story, Quenya was already well-developed and it just so happened that he has established 'talat-' to be a root word for 'fall'
Props to Mass Effect's use of this trope, not only that when you actually find a Prothean to ask about the before times he's great at reflecting a cultural worldview which isn't always great and thus makes them feel more real, but he mentions the before before times, that the Protheans had their own precursors, the Inusannon, who basically served the same purpose to the Protheans which the Protheans serve to modern galactic civilization, highlighting the cycle the Reapers have forced galactic society into. I guess I thought of this because the background music in this video made me think of Vigil's theme. Also yeah, no way Laputa wasn't getting a shoutout.
@@nebulan Is that so surprising though ? If we were those few scientists who survived on Ilos, and knew our species was doomed, you bet your arse we'd chose the planet of blue alien-compatible beauties to spend the last years of our lives !
I also appreciate that Javik essentially deconstructs the romanticized image of the Protheans from the first game by illustrating that they were essentially the Roman Empire, with "Prothean" being less a singular species and more akin to calling oneself a "Roman" - part of the empire. They were conquerors and slavers who studied "primitive races" with the expectation that those they didn't help to guide & foster wouldn't actually be able to emerge as space-faring civilizations of their own ("The lizard people [evolved]? ...They used to eat flies"). Javik himself only finds purpose in avenging his people for their destruction as the last surviving Prothean, possibly even going off to **** himself because he finds it the only fitting fate for him. He's the nihilism Shepard must resist, or perhaps even convince to change his mind, characterizing the thematic struggle between the Star trek-like optimism of the first game with the peaking despair of the third game, the possibility of a Reaper-less future v. the many graves they filled throughout history.
@@thirdcoinedge While the Protheans really weren't as good as assumed before we get Javik's testimony, it's important to remember that Javik still isn't exactly a reliable narrator. He makes no attempt to hide his biases, and the fact is that he never knew what the Prothean civilization was like before the Reaper's came. He was born nearly 2 centuries after the Reaper invasion, and raised from birth to be a weapon of vengeance. He's been "normal" (as opposed to Reaper based) indoctrinated his entire life to be the way he is, which is to either reestablish Prothean dominance after the Reapers are gone or to go out taking as many Reaper forces with him as possible.
7:43 I love that Halo did Option 1 and Option 2 at the same time. The Precursors were "destroyed" by the Forerunners. Then thousands of years later, the Precursors's "dead" cells re-animate and return as The Flood and are such a horrific threat to all life that the Forerunner wipe themselves out with the Halos. And in the original story Bungie was telling, the Forerunner were Human.
I’m replaying the two Horizon games right now, and it’s such a good example of this. I was tickled to see the clips you used. That they highlight individuals who make individual choices within the larger cultural and technological legacies makes it feel real. It’s the way history happens. It’s part of why I replay these games, because that dance between individual and collective, new and old, the failed and the as-yet unbowed, it’s fascinating. I love it when creators get it right. These are always thought provoking bangers.
I think Metroid has a pretty interesting take on Precursors. The Chozo have all the hallmarks: lived a long time ago, created a bunch of cool and/or evil stuff, the works. But, the Chozo only started their fall relatively recently. As a race of warrior bird people, they attained near immortality. However, after thousands of years, they realized that they were too old to lay eggs anymore. So, they begin taking a more passive role on the galactic stage. And they are still around, they just like staying out of the public eye.
Metroid is like the only series where the protagonist, a human approximately in her 20's or 30's, is the legitimate heir to the precursor civilization by virtue of having been adopted by them just before their fall.
a lot of ancient precursors are the writer putting an appropriately themed glove on before reaching down with the hand of god and shaping the setting the way they see fit.
The Fallout series has an odd kind of twist on Precursors -- they're us. Or at least, they're the alternate timeline version of us, in a world that diverged when the Bikini Atoll h-bomb test never happened and the world never fell out of love with the power of the atom (hence, also, no Godzilla, because Godzilla is basically America in a lizard suit and was directly inspired by the Bikini Atoll test). Most of the lessons learned in the game are about how bad an idea it is to try to cling to or reclaim the past, because the path the past was on led to the atomic destruction everyone is trying to survive in. The tagline of the games is the key lesson: "War; War never changes.". Human beings, given the ability to wage planet disrupting war, will do it over and over and over again, because in the Fallout universe, they never learn the lesson.
Robert Silverberg did a 2-book series on the opposite of that (At Winter's End)....spoiler warning.... ....survivors of a future apocalypse assumed they were human but it turns out they were apes and the humans were extinct.
@@louisduarte8763 I love when seemingly directly-contradictory statements aren't actually mutually exclusive due to context. It's like "nothing is true" from Assassin's Creed and "everything is true" from The Secret World. The titular creed of the Assassins is about the importance of personal responsibility in the face of the fact that societal rules are all just made up, and TSW's tagline is about all the things lurking beneath what humans accept as reality. (Insert State of Matter Here) Snake is similarly correct in a way that does not contradict Ron Perlman's iconic narration. Because one's talking about the *how,* and the other about the *why.*
Similar szenario‘s with some future Humanity being the ancient precoursors are also (spoilers)… Horizon (Basically Humanity gets killed by out of controlly self replicating military robots using organic material as fuel) Xenoblade 1&2 (An artifact providing infinite energy turned up and was then during a war used by a scientist in a mix of desperation and curiosity to create a new universe, leaving earth in ruins.) (Thinking about it, technically in Xenoblade 3, the cultures of the first two games are the ancient precursors, but uniquely, the goal there is, to restore the worlds ancient precursors to how they were exactly.)
Reminds me of a response a friend of mine once gave - he was being asked about some unfinished Lore for his setting, and while previously he had left some precursor-y bits around, constant questions had led to fleshing them out a bit. Eventually this led to the founding of the precursor civilization, and going for an epic level of "this is how old somethings are", it was revealed that the precursors had, themselves, built their civilization upon the remnants of an even older race of precursors. When this began to spiral into curiosity about that new group, the flatly responded: "Its precursors all the way down."
The Dragonlance setting for D&D actually has a really interesting version of this, where the thing that killed the precursors was absolutely self inflicted and hubristic, and everyone knows it and doesn't want to touch it with a 10 foot pole. But I think a big part of that is that the stories a lot of us know take place only 300 or so years after the event that destroyed that society, so it's still kinda fresh in the cultural memory, compared to the usual thousands of years for this trope.
A lot of post-apocalyptic stories (especially if the apocalypse happened before living memory) essentially cast modern humans as the precursors. They enjoyed the fruits of incomprehensibly advanced technology, shaped the world to their whims and even ventured into the stars....and then it all went horribly wrong somehow, and made the world we're living in right now.
Just imagine being a medieval peasant seeing the ruins left behind by your Roman ancestors and by the time you came along all the history and knowledge had been lost leaving you to piece together what happened. Really gives you plenty to work with when it comes to storytelling
Image even 100 years or so, many bulding, and homes that have survived will become that. Hell image what the internet would be in future archeological studies
@@compatriot852 Being in Britain in the early Dark Ages must have been incomprehensible. You and your family live humbly among the dead wealth of the old world. Ruined villas that your great-grandfathers witnessed alive now crumbling, with their marble walls stolen away by time and hungry new builders, miles of fields lying fallow for a century. A city, grander than you can possibly imagine, rotting at the end of the Thames. A city so eldritch that even the German invaders seem to fear it. A city that may be great again, but for now is only a corpse.
There's an absolutely fantastic game about just that! It's called Pentiment and it's by the people who brought us Fallout New Vegas. It is set in a small fictional village of Bavaria in the early to mid 16th century, with some immaculate Name of the Rose vibes and an art style to die for.
Its actually pretty sad, unless the place was declared a holy place/church (aka coliseum and despite this you can see how it looks like a cheese in the present) the most common thing was that those ruins ended up used as in the best case a refuge for outlaws, hunter and etc, as free wall for you new house (in the case of city and castle walls) and the worst free building materials for houses, churches and etc. Sadly people just started to care about the past recently
@@Rebhussy I would rephrase that as "Sadly people could only *afford* to care about the past recently." From what I can tell, our ancestors were just as curious as we are, but survival was legit harder then, and often won the fight for resources.
I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desart. Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed: And on the pedestal these words appear: "My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" No thing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Ozymandias was the Greek name for Ramses II. One of his sons invented Egyptology, and had plans to renovate the Great Pyramids because they were already rundown.
My favorite version of the “can God create a rock so heavy he can’t lift it” question is the one from the Simpsons: “can God make a burrito so hot he can’t pick it up”
My favorite version of this is Bug Fables where bugs have a sprawling society in what is just a backyard of an abandoned house and the humans, known to the bugs as Giants, are just gone with no real knowledge on what happened
I think it's two tropes in one. One, the small critters story, where small critters (mice, bugs, elves, etc) living in one's floorboards. Two, ancient precursors.
9:30 Metroid Prime had an interesting take on the “ascended to a higher plane” precursors. The Chozo colony on Tallon 4 foresaw a “corruption” befalling the planet, and ascended to a higher plane. When said corruption, a meteor full of Phazon, landed, it actually brought several of the Chozo back into the physical world and drove them insane, leading to the Chozo ghosts you have to fight later in the game.
I had this same thought! Most Chozo in Metroid have simply died out or disappeared without explanation, but Prime explains the Tallon IV chozo disappearance exactly like this.
@@Treebohr Honestly, the Chozo are also unlike most precursors because their mass disappearance happened fairly recently in-universe. The Tallon IV Chozo ascended around 50 years ago, the Zebes Chozo that raised Samus only died around 10-15 years before Zero Mission, and the Thoha and Mawkin tribes in Dread were similarly wiped out around that time frame.
To me the best real world analogy to the precursor trope is how medieval Europe viewed ancient Rome. There were definitely a few people who knew that those giant ancient buildings were built by humans and not giants, but for most people, the ruins were mysterious places that made for convenient building material sources.
Rome was perhaps a bit too familiar to medieval Europe; a closer analogue may be the perspective Greece of antiquity had of Mycenaean Greece. This was their own ancestors, yet with the gulf of the Bronze Age Collapse between them they conceived the towers of old as having been built by the Cyclopes because surely only the Cyclopes had the strength to move such enormous boulders (hence Cyclopean masonry).
@@LordInsane100 when you think about how the oldest surviving song literally starts with "in the old days, before the old ones learned to lit up the fire to make bread" or something like that that's Sumerians, our "Capital P" Precursors and they were already singing about precursors it's quite literally is all precursors all the way down
"Sir! The Leopards-Eating-People's-Faces device-- it's gone haywire!" "My god..." 😂 thank you for taking a hard reverse right turn into the ridiculous.
My favorite implementation of this is in the Halo series. Throughout the main games there are references to the Forerunners, an ancient universe spanning race that created the Halo Installations as terrariums for studying and preserving life, as well as superweapons to wipe the universe clean of life in order to starve our the Flood, a parasitic zombie fungus type race. However, getting into the books we learn that the Forerunners have their *own* ancient universe spanning civilization that came before them called the, well, Precursors. The Precursors are so ancient compared to the Forerunners that their history only exists in mythology and legend, but it turns out the Flood are the last remnants of the Precursors that died off millions of years before. The universe is so huge and so old that the ancient precursors have their own ancient precursors, and those precursors became their own descendants.
I think the Nomai from Outer Wilds is my favorite example of this trope. Their mark is left ALL over the world and the whole game is basically finding out “what happened to these guys?” The have both advanced tech and ancient looking murals all over their ruins. Also both their swirly text and the translation device you use on it look sick.
One important thing to remember with advanced precursor tech is that even if some of the precursors still live, they wont necessarily know anything about how the tech works or how to replicate it. Imagine picking out 1000 random people and asking them to make a smartphone or even just a combustion engine.
God I sure do love when a Sci-Fi series goes on too long and we start giving the Precursors Percursors until we eventually reach the point where the most Precursory of precursors is Humanity.
And occasionally the precursor of a precursor is officially named “the precursors” because at some point writers lose the ability to come up with creative names
Thank you for this! One of my DND players surprised me by saying their character's goal is to understand some ancient history in my world building and I have been desperately scrambling for ideas to flesh out the history and create a compelling arc for its research and discovery! This has given me so much inspiration!
Having this play is so much better imo as a kind of audio book more than a proper video. For me videos like yours are awesome but feeling like I'm watching it makes me feel forced so I leave and don't come back. But listening to it gives me the same pros but another of drawing my characters while getting the knowledge and enjoyment much easier into my brain
i love that there's so goddamn MANY precursors in that series. Some of them are still around like the Sheikah, and don't seem at all interested in reclaiming their old glory. They're seen as wise but not because of that. Then suddenly you have the Zonai who were apparently the ancestors of Hylia itself. And of course the fact that Hylians, Gorons, Zora, and Gerudo are so old that they're their OWN precursors, just so much has been lost over the millennia as to make the ancestral past almost entirely unknown to the present day
One of my favorite tropes is when characters get handed something from a _much_ higher level of tech than they should have access to, and proceed to... bumble around with it. Fail to understand its functions beyond the basic stuff, use it in all kinds of unintended ways, and generally have no clue what they're doing. That has so much potential for both comedy and drama that it never fails to make me smile. Bonus points if there's a precursor or similar still around to facepalm at the mess
I love how that feels in Caves of Qud. It's a VERY junk-punk world and even though Relics from a Before Time are everywhere, you need to study them to have any idea what they are or how they work. Like, sometimes you pick up a relic and it's called a "Bunch of pipes" and it looks like a gun.. Nope, it's just a collapsible taser rod. Or the reverse "Oh, man, this thing is just a folding chair, I mean look at the sprite... WAIT, what do you mean it's a bazooka?!"
There’s definitely one bit in _Assassin’s Creed 3_ where Juno tells you off for humanity having spent 75 millennia squabbling over the Isu’s trash and putting off using the wonderful doohickeys to deal with the Sun being about to explode again until like a month beforehand
I wasn’t ready for you to tackle ancient precursors as a topic by starting with the integral experience of individuality. This is exactly the rich depth I watch your videos for
I just found this video inside an ancient cave; it's crazy how much you ancestors knew about narrative tropes! I bet this discovery will have no consequences on my simple little life and society as a whole
The "First Ones" from Babylon 5 are a great example of mixing and matching every aspect of this trope into one story. They're the ones who stepped aside, but also returned as antagonists, but also left dangerous technology behind, but also left some immortals among us, but also became arrogant and fought a war against each other, but also a bunch of other stuff. And on top of that, there's an even older First One who preceded the other First Ones!
SDF Macross has a rather good precursor idea. While gone they sealed their great enemy that destroyed them, left a living relic in the soldiers that are the immediate threat of the first series and ultimately it's about the other successors ( the species that are born from their backup plan) to study the tech of the previous civilization and the ramifications of their own problems compounding it.
@@A-Legitimate-Salvage and to start to have the technology to back up the command. Babylon 5 shows what happens when the babies start to be able to push back against the precursors.
This might be the best trope talks you've done so far, in part because the social philosophy implied by the topic, and how well you touched on it. More like this please!
Precursor civilizations are probably one of my favorite tropes that I will like no matter how much it’s overused. Something about the melancholic wonder of ancient ruins just does it for me.
"Where are all the grownups?" Is a theme associated with SciFi, Futurism, and the Fermi Paradox. One answer explored in the Schlock Mercenary comic is, they're all running away from the galaxy before a younger upcoming civilization does something really bad that obliterates everything. It's a very interesting twist on ancient civilizations, and could apply to Fantasy as much as SciFi.
Yeah, I like Schlock Mercenary's take. And also, like, the grownups are smart and all, but sometimes the new kid can also come in and accidentally make a really good point about how to adult better. (And because it was Tagon's idea, it was *rigorously* simmed.)
Kirby somehow has the same precursors have two different endings depending on how you look at it. because Forgotten Land puts them squarely in the 'ascended' territory, with them abandoning their planet after not only winning when the eldritch horrors come knocking, but then using said eldritch horror to unlock fast travel. flash forward an unknown amount of time, and those exact same people who ascended somehow manage to still die off and leave behind cool things to explore and occasionally beat up.
You haven't even mentioned the really crazy part of that. The voice over in the facility states those precursors went to a "land of dreams", as in Dreamland, the setting of the Kirby games, Implying the denizens of Planet Popstar are the distant descendants of those precursors.
Halo has a few examples as you showed with the Forerunners and Flood. The Flood are essentially the corrupted DNA of the original Precursors, who were nearly wiped out by the Forerunners in a classic case of 'What could go wrong with trying to wipe outs the gods out of spite?' And the strange thing is that in 1 way or another, they all survived. The Flood are some the biggest antagonists of the first 3 games and a lot of the literature or spin offs like Halo Wars 1&2, the Forerunners tech is nearly in perfect condition and their monitors carry on their legacy, and there's even at least 1 still living; uncorrupted Precursor running around in the EU. Edit: I forgot about how ancient humanity lived alongside the Forerunners.
@@TheSpaceCommunist "Humans are forerunner" - Guilty Spark 343. Then the forerunners show up as enemies in Halo 4 instead of just being a long dead civilization. Who thought that was a good idea?
13:24 lets also not forget Sauron achieving one of the greatest player-hater moments of all time by fooling the Numenorians (who literally defeated him and Morgoth in battle) into making him their religious leader and then basically allowing him to gaslight the entire civilization into thinking God had abandoned them. Truly an aspirational hater.
I have never been more excited for the podcast episode discussing this video, between you and Blue! The real world examples are so much fun and I can't wait to see how they bounce off against the fantasy examples that you're presenting! Great video as always!
i actually like how the Elder Scrolls games deal with the Dwemer differently from Morrowind to Skyrim. In Morrowind they were a lesson in hubris. We have people (like vivec and the tribunal) who won over them, and grew up in a world where they were an active part of the world. Fast forward over 200 years, and all those people are long dead and the knowledge of who or what the dwemer were, how they were vanished, its all gone from the populace. Here, the dwemer becomes a creepy mystery. i like the idea of how the meaning of a lost civilisation changes depending on the time away from it - in the same way a person’s death takes different meaning through the decades and centuries.
The game Enderal adds a neat twist to this trope that I'm not sure I've seen elsewhere. The standard "medieval fantasy" setting doesn't just have an ancient lost society with mechanical ruins everywhere, it has dozens, if not hundreds! There's been a cycle of apocalyptic end times happening to civilizations like clockwork going back so far, the modern people didn't even know about the previous ones until they found the last group's notes on it. The entire main quest line is trying to stop this apocalypse from happening, despite knowing that all of your precursors had better timelines for magical and technological development, and still couldn't stop it.
I love the version of this trope where there's very few surivivors of the precursors but they don't rememeber or havent internalised the very flaws that caused their downfall still after so long, so when they get an opportunity to tell the characters about their own time, they wax poetic about a utopia that never existed, bonus points if we then get to go abck in time and see the flaws ourselves.
And sometimes the precursor has a precursor! And the shattering of the first race was because a guy gave a bird depression so hard she started to purge life
Lands that stretched on forever. Skies one could drown in. The heartbeat of nature, silent yet strong. And amidst it all a people. Beacons of light and life. Laughter that warmed my heart like naught else before
My favorite version of the ancient precursor is the one that destroyed themselves with superweapons that *definitely aren't* nuclear weapons, and whose fate *definitely isn't* a cautionary tale for our own civilization that has the capacity to make itself into a long-lost precursor in fifteen minutes
I love this, I also love when you see the conflicting ideas about the precursors because no one knows for sure. And that's satisfying because it has a comparison to modern anthropology and archeology, we don't know how much we don't know.
“Attempting a military takeover of heaven is stupid”
Monkey: hold my elixir of immortality
Yeaaah, we best leave that one to the experts. The experts being Monkey.
Which one? You have so many!?!
But... is that a military takeover? Or just Monkey?
So, military takeover: stupid. Solo rampage: questionable, but definitely worthwhile overall.
Monkey rejects her reality, and substitutes his own.
I think the “Stop trying to restart ancient empires you god damn bastards” lesson might in fact be mainly historical. The sheer number of people who’ve been killed by maniacs trying to get back Rome and Alexander’s Greece alone might give any sane person pause.
To be fair, most of those people simply looked at those guys and went 'Cool, so if I kill my neighbours I can get stuff!' without looking into how those empires were built and maintained. Rome in particular has a lot of interesting features, like how it was the first civilization to have citizenship both something that can be earned by non-Romans and is valuable to obtain, which led to a lot of foreigners serving the Empire to their highest capacity in the hopes of some social mobilization. Meanwhile the latest guy with plans for a new Rome, Mussolini, had nothing but trouble with the lands he conquered before.
I'm not saying we should go back to an era where you'd be left rotting on a wooden bar simply because you were at the wrong place at the wrong time, I'm not part of Caesar's Legion, but the Roman Empire was a magnificent achievement with a lot of nifty features that we should consider adapting for modern times, and in fact, already have borrowed a lot of stuff from.
@@the_tactician9858 Hell, Alexander himself was a case of exactly that. The guy wanted to imitate Cyrus' empire (with himself at the top), but only got to the conquering part. And so, as soon as he died, the empire fractured in a gigantic civil war.
@@samuelpoveda7853 That's why I never mentioned the guy, because he was exactly like you said, all conquest, no ruling. Which, mind you, is still impressive, but I still like his father better for actually giving Alex the tools he could use for such a trip. And yes, Alexander did nothing to integrate the empire, and with his death it pretty much disintegrated instead. Then again, he was at least smart enough to present himself as a pharao to the Egyptians, so Ptolemaic Egypt was probably the last time Egypt actually went through a golden age of sorts.
A lot of those people who want to revive the old empires are also quietly admiring the unjust hierarchies of those eras, and that a lot of minority groups were heavily oppressed.
@@leviadragon99 More like the other way around, I feel... bigots always use the past to justify their opinions on hating their group of choice, elevating their nation's glorious past and handily forgetting that which doesn't make their dream look good, like how Roman culture borrowed many things from other regions and cultures. Though, I will admit that Venn diagram is a lot tighter than I like to see
In a mind blowing facts thread on reddit someone pointed out that ancient egypt lasted so long that there where egyptian archaeologists and historians studying early ancient egypt during what we consider to still be ancient egypt.
My world history class was terrible. Facts like that really put time into perspective.
Cleopatra is closer to us than she is to the building of the Gaza Pyramids. The Pyramids were to the Romans as the Romans are to us: ancient history, works of a "dead" civilization, ancestors to the current.
Egypt is old, VERY old. One of the cradles of civilization..
when playing Assasins Creed origins: the pyramids you visit are thousends of years old some of the old temples that are burried in sand are super ancient
@@colt9836 Hell, even if you don't count Cleopatra (cause that was a Greek dynasty) the last native Egyptian ruler Nectanebo II was about halfway between our time and the building of the great pyramids. Not to mention that those don't even go back to the earliest dynasties of Egypt. Egyptian civilization is so old that mammoths were still alive at the same time as ancient Egypt, and IIRC the beginnings of the civilization may have been brought on by people fleeing the drying Sahara to go to the fertile Nile river.
So, you know the Shelley poem _Ozymandias,_ about how the power of human tyrants is nothing against that of just lots of time? Well, Ozymandias is the Greek name for Ramses II, and one of his sons was the first Ancient Egyptian Egyptologist, which is just the sort of fantastic neatness that you’d decry as contrived if it happened in fiction.
@@JimBob4233
Isn't Setne stuck in a snow globe somewhere?
Shoutout to Hollow Knight for being "Oops, All Precursors."
- Hallownest
- The Snail Shamans
- The Moths
- The Spiders in Deepnest
- The bees, kinda?
- Whatever was going on with the void in the Abyss
- The Godseekers' original home
- Everything the Grimm Troupe ate
Playing Hollow Knight rn and came to the comments to see if someone else would mention it LOL I find it all very interesting and breathtaking but also a little confusing time line wise lol (abt halfway thru the game)
Don’t forget greenpath! Unn was there before the pale king
Hollow knight mention!
I was like "Hm this is starting to sound like hollow knight"
Hollow Knight's setting is basically post-apocalyptic. Everyone's a precursor if there's no one left.
My favorite precursors thing is that TV Tropes has a page for "Neglectful Precursors" (who leave dangerous stuff lying around for no reason). On the page there are all the usual folders ("Films", "Literature", "Video Games"), but in addition to "Live Action TV", the Stargate franchise gets its OWN FOLDER, because the Ancients just left THAT MUCH poorly-labeled dangerous technology lying around.
Now, to be completely fair to such precursors, humanity would absolutely create a bunch of dangerous stuff, forget to label it, and simply move directly on to make more dangerous stuff.
Just think about how much gets lost in the mail on a daily basis, now imagine the mail is like nuclear power cells or something.
@@RustBot42
Now include the fact that we store nuclear waste with symbols whose meaning will be lost to time and tada,
Humans leaving random dangerous materials that is unlabelled.
@@minitntman1236 The issue of labeling nuclear waste for millennia's to come is actually taken very seriously, messages of varying complexity in a lot of different languages, mostly as technical information for a similarly advanced civilisation to be able to pickup the work of finding a less hazardous solution, stored onto various physical formats such has sapphire CDs (has well has instructions on what a CD is and how it works), and tablets with very tiny text on them, readable with simple lenses.
And has a less informative but more direct deterrent, the area around these sites are to be covered in a thick concrete slab with large spikes making the area barren of ressources and largely inhabitable, to avoid people settling there and accidentally digging into the nuclear storage.
As well as pictograms ofc, as an in-between measure.
We know what archeology and deciphering ancient languages is like, so we can make the job easier for future civilisations.
@@minitntman1236I think the symbol of a black angel against the background of a golden halo means these things contain holy relics left here by god for us to find.
@@bombkangaroo "This place is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here. What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. "
Oh, that's exactly what you'd put on a place to that's definitely full of valuable shit! Get digging.
I don’t think there’s a TH-cam series I get as excited for consistently when a new episode drops than Trope Talk. This is a fantastic series.
Yes! I've been watching this series for AGES. This and detail diatribes.
Big facts
This and their Journey to the west videos. Ive been watching theses videos since i was in highschool and can safely say they have drastically helped me in my writing endeavors.
IKR
honestly OSP and Tale Foundry are the two best channels on youtube. absolutely love red and blue tho, been watching them for YEARS. love em
For it is said that in the distant past a woman of crimson did sit up on a throne before an inferno and speak upon great tales.
What reference is this?
@@MagnustheDemon71look at the video
@@MagnustheDemon71 Nothing specific, I was just casting Red as a precursor herself.
@@MagnustheDemon71homie not everything's a reference to something 🤦♀️
@@GriffinPilgrim ooooh okay
I’m surprised Red would cover this trope given…
“Society peaked with my birth and subsequent existence” - Red, Shadow of the Colossus stream❤😁
It had to reach there first, and thus precursors created the ground for Red to be the peak of society.
what a quote. Something to live by fr fr
This, of course, just means that Red IS the precursor.
Even that quote of Red’s is her quoting the lost precursor that is Calvin and Hobbes.
The Precursors crawled so Red could talk.
That opening monologue got me thinking, “We are, each of us, a multitude. I am not the man I was this morning, nor the man of yesterday. I am a throng of myself queued through time. We are, gentle reader, each a crowd within a crowd.”
Huh, never heard of that book series before. It's not quite Whitman's "I contain multitudes" or Heraclitus' "No man ever steps in the same river twice," but it's pretty good.
@@Duiker36 To be fair, I haven't read/heard of it either. The Carl Sagan version "And you are made of a hundred trillion cells. We are, each of us, a Multitude." didn't fit right in this context and I discovered this alternate quote which I liked more.
One of my favorite 'what happened to the precursors' reveals in fiction is Halo.
Humanity finds an ancient, planet-sized megastructure and travels to its surface - only to find no trace of its creators. You find yourself wondering who built this thing, why it exists, what its purpose is. Then you find a dark facility in the middle of a murky swamp, and are in no way prepared for the horrors that await you within. By the time you realize what you've actually found, it's too late.
It's a prison. And you just opened it.
Didn't the Covenant open the Flood's prison 1st?
@@louisduarte8763 Technically, but I'm embellishing a little for flair :P
Not just a prison, but also a colossal shotgun pointed at the head of the galaxy. And you were mere moments away from unwittingly pulling the trigger.
And then you slowly realize that these precursors were Humanity's ancestors, meaning that you have to clean up grandpa's mess
@@vaniellysthe precursors are not humanities ancestors in both 343 and bungie lore, In bungie lore the precursors don’t exist and its the forerunners which are the ancestors of humanity, in 343 lore the precursors are multiversal God like beings that like playing games with species by evolving them and then absorbing their experiences through the flood at a later time, in this canon the forerunners are also not humanities ancestors and are a completely different race
This line from jak and daxter goes hard: “I have spent my life searching for the answers that my father, and my father's fathers, failed to find. Who were the Precursors? Why did they create the vast monoliths that litter our planet? How did they harness eco, the life energy of the world? What was their purpose, and why did they vanish? I have asked the plants, but they do not remember. The plants have asked the rocks, but the rocks do not recall-even the rocks do not recall.”
JAK AND DAXTER MENTIONED🔥🗣️🔊🔈WTF IS A BAD GAME
Turns out the Rocks did know and told the Plants, but the Plants thought the Rocks were pulling a fast one on them and didn't tell Samos what they said.
That is some HP Lovecraft type lore right there. Reminds me of him describing the nameless city, where he says it's too old for Babylon to remember or something like that.
@@TheFirstLaughingFool I have completed all the games apart from lost frontier and I genuinely have no clue what you’re talking about
The precursors from the Jak & Daxter series have always fascinated me. Even when a face is put to them, the game does a good job of maintaining their mysteriousness.
There’s a ruin of a tiny ancient Byzantine church on the islet of Daskalio, right off Keros in the Lesser Cyclades. It was probably used in the 7th or 8th century, one and a half thousand years ago. Being so ancient, it’s completely fallen apart since, an almost incomprehensibly old structure that it would be absolutely surreal to stand within.
It’s built on the very top of a steep hill, and it’s made out of marble from the nearby island of Naxos. But the Romans didn’t import the marble: they pulled it out of the ground from the barely visible ruins that were _already there._ Because in the Bronze Age, _three thousand years before them,_ Daskalio was inhabited by a thriving Cycladic religious settlement.
Imagine being a Roman stepping onto that hill and beholding the abyss of time and feeling so, so small.
Ancient Precursors are my absolute favorite fictional trope because they’re _real._
One of my favorite footnotes in that vein: Sardinia used to be a major military power in the Mediterranean. Yeah, SARDINIA... the ancient ruins on Sardinia make even the Pyramids look easy to build.
This is but one example. Xenophon wrote in the Anabasis that as the ten thousand were marching north, they came across two ruined cities. Xenophon describes them as bigger and greater than any city still standing, and thus, overcome with curiosity, he spent the next few days asking the locals about the ruins. But the locals had no knowledge of who built the cities or why they were destroyed.
It took more than two thousand years before we found the answers to Xenophon's questions.
@@ΣτελιοςΠεππας Arabia has that a lot. ruined cities buried in the desert, who built it? why is it dead?
Yeah, Bronze Age Collapse and later Fall of Rome both had an "Ancient Precursor" effect on Post Mycenaean Greeks and Medieval Europeans respectively.
@marhawkman303 Yes, but these questions will probably remain unanswered considering the attitude of the locals towards pre Islamic Arabia.
"Remember us. Remember that we once lived."
I would kill for Red to breakdown FF14
If you know, you know… and it hurts….
@@InRealTime769I think she once mentioned in a live stream that there were certain types of games she doesn’t enjoy playing…. And unfortunately ffxiv falls under one of those types….
The future is now, old man.
Makes me think of a quote from an SCP short story called _Document Recovered From The Marianas Trench_ :
“Don't let them hide us. Try and find more, I know there's got to be more people who tried to leave something behind. Don't let the world die in vain. Remember us.”
I like it when the ancient precursor is just like... the previous generation.
Like asking your dad what life was before the end times or even just finding out that the teachers used to be the delinquents.
Huge monumental changes in relatively small amounts of time that just happen to be larger than your life span.
Shortly before a second grade teacher of mine retired, I heard a group of second graders complaining about a weird rule she had. I was glad to explain that she made that rule because of something I did thirteen years ago. They didn't believe m; so I explained that you had to leave your pencil at the top of the worksheet unless you were writing in the answer spot was because I doodled on the worksheets and threw a pencil at a kid who called me names.
Splatoon did this trope pretty well. Ever since the first game it was clear that the setting is on Earth thousands of years after an apocalypse, making us humans the "ancient precursors". This also made people ask the question, if the humans are gone, how did sea creatures evolve to such closely resemble them both in anatomy and culture? Splatoon 3 ended up answering that question with "they all got embedded with liquid crystals containing the hopes and dreams of a bunch of human survivors and that fast tracked their evolution". It's a lot more poignant than my shitty summary I swear.
My every attempt to communicate in a nutshell.
It also ties in with the fact that a lot of the modern day threats are from humans and their actions. The great flood that started the Great Turf War is from humans fucking up the planet, Tartar is an AI made by humans, and Grizz is a bear directly from the humans last attempt to survive.
Does this imply that it's humanity's dream to become cute squid girls/boys with spats?
I've never played Splatoon, but I have to admit, the idea of humanity being the ancient precursors to other species is kind of insane and I like it.
No no, this is a good summary
13:20 Aw man, my favorite detail from the Lord of the Rings is that we get a bunch of monologues about how the descendents of Numenor are of a purer, fairer, morally superior character which has alas been slow-dwindled by contact and intermarriage with non-numenorians, but everyone who says that is Gondorian, one of the ancestor peoples of Numenor, and all of the characters alive during the Fall like Gandalf and Elrond give some varient of "Moral race my ass, they live longer than other humans and that's about it". Just a great contrast if you're paying attention
It gets even better when you look at the history of Numenor and realize that they were slowly starting to get hubristic and ethno-centric about halfway through their runtime, loyalty to the Valar and friendship with the Elves started turning into a small cult rather than the norm, and Sauron's whispers were only the straw that broke the back of their survival.
Also when you consider that the lifespan of Gondorians were on a steady downward slope largely unaffected by that same intermarriage they're so scared of. Just look at the king who was born to a woman of Rohan. His natural lifespan was no different from his cousins, yet the assumption sparked an entire civil war that had the end result of everyone (in high society) being scared to have more than 2 children or risk another "Kinstrife", as if a high birthrate was anywhere close to the reason for it.
Elrond especially gives off "disappointed family member" vibes when it comes to Numenor, which is fitting because he's the *insert number of greats* uncle of their entire royal family.
Ancestor people of Numenor?
@@anjetto1 I think the group that founded Gondor is the same group that became the Numenoreans, but I could be remembering wrong and they just meant descendants.
@gunnarschlichting9886 I thought gondor was a remnant of numenor. So they're desendants. Right?
Love me some Mass Effect
The Reapers: Not only did we wipe out your precursors, we wiped out your precursors precursors back through infinity.
Shepard: *dabs in RGB*
But the real precursors are still there, millions of years later, chilling in their waters
The Reapers' Precursors: Yeah, they didn't get us all, but as far as we're concerned they actually deserve to do their thing, so we're just gonna sit down here in this puddle for the rest of time and watch the cycles go by.
And also: All that cool stuff you found? They didn't even make that, we did! They just discovered it. As did their precursors and their precursors and so on.
And whenever the time comes to wipe out all those pesky organics, we just have to go where we left all the space travel things to find them.
I love that the Reapers are so terrifying because they're essentially the answer to the question of "what if the Bronze Age Collapse happened on purpose"? They are the very death of civilizations, embodied in robot space squids. Granted, the given reason for WHY they do this is rather unsatisfying, but the very idea of them is still one of the reasons why Mass Effect works so well. "You exist because we allow it, and you will end because we demand it."
@@thirdcoinedge The strategy game Stellaris has something like that, in the form of the Contingency, which periodically destroy all advanced civilisations to prevent some unspecified disaster that would somehow be worse than them. And given that another way to "win" the game is to blow up the galaxy to ascend your civilisation to become beings of pure thought....they might have a point.
“This day cannot get any worse”
-Random Kryptonian, about to be proven wrong
You would not believe how hard I laughed at this!
20 seconds later a kid smashes through his cart of kryptonian cabbages.
"My cabbages! Okay, NOW this day cannot get any worse!"
-Same Guy, about to be proven wrong, AGAIN
Why did I read this in TFA Starscream voice?! 😂
@@TheKarishi is this supposed to be a ATLA reference?
And 3 times out of five, it was Brainiac.
i think hollow knight has one of the most fascinating takes with precursors. the entire setting is that of a fallen and dying kingdom, all remnants of it being the lone survivors of a calamitous infection that was in part due to an even older religious sect that got erased by the current dying kingdom, which that old religious sect quite possibly also shut down an even OLDER mysterious civilzation whose ruins and influence are throughout the entire game and so little is known about them that it becomes so interesting
And you're one of the heirs, the other keeps trying to stab you.
"Since a solid 70% of the Fantasy genre is just looking over Tolkien's shoulder and taking notes" best sentence of the year 😍🤣🤣
It's also incorrect.
These days it's closer to 20% taking notes from Tolkien, 35% taking notes from people who took notes from Tolkien, and 25% taking notes from people who took notes from people who took notes from Tolkien.
Fun Tolkien Fact: "The Fall of Numenor" could also be said as "The Fall of Man". "The Fall of Man" would be translated into Elven by combining the words "Man"/"Atan" and "To Have Fallen"/"Lante" into the compound term "Atalante". Tolkien did love his puns.
That is the most beautifully stupid convoluted set up for such a pun I've ever heard. I really, really hope that was actually intentional.
@@johnathanmonsen6567 Considering Tolkien's biggest gimmick is Linguistics, I'd say it was, in fact, I'm pretty sure his world was made to explain Elven then he just got really into it
@@GoblinLord afaik that's pretty much exactly what happened, he invented the languages first and then ironed out a world with people who spoke them.
Which is exactly my type of nerd xD
"Could God create a rock so heavy he couldn't lift it?"
"Yes, AND IT KILLED HIM!"
~ OSP, 2024
God is dead, for the unliftable rock killed him - Red Nietzsche
Nukes in a nutshell
Fitting IP to be showing in the background during that part as well.
@@orsolyafekete7485 Redrick Nietzche
That sounds like an SCP waiting to happen
The fact that the Numenoreans were originally Tolkien's attempt at a future sci fi story because C.S. Lewis challenged him to write one but then was retooled to be in middle earths past is so funny to me because he did the ancient alien precursor trope AND the Atlantis trope with one people. A two for one deal. I guess when in the ancient tales of the silmarillion ancient people "flew on ships in the sky" its a 50/50 shot on whether there were magic ships or space ships. Both interpretations could be plausibly correct.
I can't remember where he wrote it, but apparently at one point Tolkien played with the idea that the Numenoreans were industrialized and their ships were like modern tankers with steel hulls and coal/gas powered.
@@KingBuilder525 yeah full steampunk and everything
See, now I'm picturing full on Spelljammer style Numenoreans...
If Rings of Power was good we'd see printing presses and hot air balloons in Numenor
I’m pretty glad he didn’t considering “fantasy plus industrial revolution” is virtually everywhere, even to a decent extent in Tolkien’s world. Having that stuff would be a distraction from the folklore and it fits better with Numenor being another rich and fantastical place whose disappearance leads to a somewhat less fantastic new age, akin to what happens with the elves in RotK.
My favourite approach to “Ascended Precursors” comes in Iain M. Banks’ Culture books. Wherein it’s just a thing that advanced galactic civilisations tend to do, some of them leave behind boobytrapped toys, and most of the galaxy is annoyed that the Culture themselves haven’t got around to ascending because they’re inveterate busybodies.
@@cerandor23 in the Culture’s defense, they have reasons to think that /something/ is hinky with the whole ascension business, and in fact created a Mind whose whole job it was to ascend, then descend again to tell them what was going on on the Higher Planes (since the Ascended tend to be kinda tight-lipped about the whole business).
When said Mind came back completely and irrevocably insane, then immediately committed self-deletion, the Culture rather sensibly decided that this whole “ascension” business probably wasn’t for them.
@@Ryan-jm5jp What book was that Mind in?
I've annoyed so many friends/co- workers/anyone who will listen by going "well in the Culture novels..." 😅
::Vorlons intensify::
Loved that you did this video, but kinda sad that my favorite use of this trope got left out - the "Fling a Light Into The Future" Trope, where the precursors know they're screwed and leave tools and messages for whoever comes next so that they can succeed where they failed.
SCP-1281 is a great example of this.
Or Halo.
@@rmsgreyThe Halos are simultaneously a light into the future, sealed evil in a can, and irresponsible precursors. It's kinda wild.
Also City of Ember and Horizon: Zero Dawn
@@seriousbichon1595 Know who IS a Light Flung Into the Future? Superman.
Or the precursors of Mass Effect (won't spoil them but they're great).
"...Sometimes (the lesson) is to unbury (the past), take notes about the arrangement of its body, and then try not to die the same way."
That's another OSP quote going into the increasingly crowded rent-free spaces in our heads.
The main contribution of this video to my crowded free rent head space was the Leopards-eating-people's-faces Device
So in this way, ancient ruins could be considered as the civilization-level equivalent to a Dark Souls bloodstain.
I was expecting "and then bury it back just in case".
“Zero Dawn is not a super-weapons program. And it will not save us.”
The absolute chills that line gives me every time. Horizon’s Faro Plague to this day remains my favorite apocalypse in fiction.
I is the most unique in any story I have ever encountered. Great games.
It really disturbed me; I think the only other apocalypse that has disturbed as much as been the grey goo scenario (and for similar reasons).
It also recontextualizes all the messages found from soldiers fighting the plague. They were brave, willing to sacrifice themselves... and in a way they were betrayed by the "good guys". All of them belived humanitys best are working on last minute superweapon that will save everyone. That they are just buying time for completion.
It's kinda as if in Mass Effect the "give up and walk away" ending was CANON. Like yeah you are Shepard, you fought and beaten the odds countless times and all of it amounted to... you will die. everyone you know and love will die. But one day there will be new humans.
The scene where Faro deletes Apollo was also pretty kino if I remember well. The story is always strongest when it does something Faro-adjacent and forbidden west continued it in what I thought was a very satisfying and unnerving way. I actually don’t care all that much about the main characters but the lore bits are damn good.
have you noticed how Faro is just an elon musk that bought boston dynamics instead of spacex?
I think my favorite interpretation of the question “should the old ways be brought back” was in the ATLA comic “the Promis”, where the whole “Everything he knows is gone” part of Aangs character comes into play. The poor kid ends up getting hit in the face with the knowledge that his people are dead and his entire culture might die with him at some point. Aang ends up trying to navigate the complexities of keeping old traditions alive but also letting them adapt to the new situations and era at hand. Basically the conclusion was that there’s nothing wrong with honoring the old ways, but because of the nature of change, sometimes you’ll have to let a few things go, and there’s nothing wrong with that either
Speaking of The Promise, I think a great detail is in the beginning, where Aang mentions he doesn't remember _why_ they had this holiday, it's "just the way things are". And, yeah, that really hits. Aang was still a kid when the Air Nomads were genocided. He probably did not yet understand every little complexity of his culture, as most children do. And now that knowledge is lost to time, because he's the only survivor.
ATLA mention quota for the Trope Talk episode reached.
Good grief. It's impossible to get away from this bloody show...
@@minicle426 is it bad? I've never watched it
@@danzoomIt’s a wonderful show and does a lot of things right imo. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately to others) it’s brought up a lot when people reference stuff like tropes or certain stereotypes in fiction. Whether that’s a good or bad thing is ultimately up to you.
0:46 This is essentially the definition of my favorite word: "sonder." It's the feeling that comes with making this realization and just having it in mind. As you said, it's not something we can think about all the time, so it's just a temporary feeling like any other emotion. Giving these more specific and hard-to-put-your-finger-on emotions is really interesting. There are so many out there, waiting to be found and used by someone who is feeling them and wants to give it a name to better understand it.
That's why I fell in love with Dune saga (and no, I got into it before the movie). Herbert set the universe a huge leap ahead of time making present us the precursors.He mentions the advancement of science, culture, religion and even concept of humankind and how everything almost collapsed due to either robots going rogue or space HRE shenanigans. Also I find it really funny to call french "an ancient, complex dialect"
-Ah , so the Necrons/Techo-mummies are the precursors ?
-No , that would be the Old Ones , the Necrons are like , , that grumpy grampa of the galaxy that yells to us to "Get off there lawn" , wielding de-atomizing shotguns .
To be fair 40k is basically oops all precursers all the way down. The aeldari and drukhari have the old eldar empire to look to, the necrons are as you said precursors themselves, and the imperium is unique in that they precursored themselves twice, the dark of technology humanity and then imperium of the 31st millennium.
Ah the Necrons, the only faction in the setting that actually has a permanent viable solution to the whole chaos problem and GW is too busy shilling astartes to care.
@@friarnausk5586I mean, the tyranids have a pretty good solution to that themselves. It's called "OM NOM NOM NOM!". Can't feed the warp and chaos if there's nothing left to feed them.....because you ate it all already
@@friarnausk5586 I'd say GW is too busy shilling chaos to care that there are many factions that can deal with chaos. The Necrons removing the martial from the inmaterial effectively killing anything in either that relies on both to survive. The shadow of the warp bugs break chaos on a metaphysical level and even the Votann computers remember dark age technology that can cover souls making them not interact with the warp.
Hard counters aside, the Krork were able to body the Old Ones thus it stands to reason they could do the same to the chaos gods if the chaos gods were awake when the Krock were around. The elves of fantasy were able to 99% kill a chaos god when they finally pulled their heads out of their asses so I would assume if they eldar got their shit together they could figure something out.
Really the only reason the chaos gods seem so scary is because of how young and pathetic us humans are. To us humans they are ancient precursors but quite a few 40k factions still see chaos as a recent addition and as new kids on the block.
@@floricel_112 Yeah but then we don't have a setting anymore.
Warhammer 40K has basically every flavour of precursor.
The Old Ones got bipped by the Necrons and the C’Tan, who are still around and only just waking up alongside their technology that is so incomprehensibly advanced it’s easier to explain how actual literal magic works.
The Eldar were created by the Old Ones, founded a massive empire after the war in heaven, then got bipped by their own depravity and decadence which created Slaanesh.
The Krorks, also created by the Old Ones, devolved into the Orks, who unlike the the other 3, didn’t leave behind any ancient cities or relics because Orks are utterly transient, and only the orkish culture remains because it’s hard coded into their biology, and their biology remains because the Old Ones made them really hard to truly get rid of.
Don’t forget that the precursor civilization humanity has the most contact with is also humanity. People desperately cling to the shards of devices and templates that their ancestors created, mythologizing them because they can’t really understand the principles that their own civilization’s previous state mastered.
I’ve always enjoyed the interaction between the immediate need for every trace of old human knowledge the imperium can get to deal with the *very very immediate problems oh god THEY’RE HERE* and the reality that depending on old scraps prevents them from making genuine scientific progress on their own, to reach the heights they had made it to before.
For the life of me I can’t remember the book but it is at one point revealed that the Arks Mechanicus contain sentient ai, full stc sets and weaponry so advanced it can reverse the targets’ flow of time. And the mechanicus just has no idea how to access any of this is right under their noses but *this is what humanity was capable of* and could be again.
also humanity and its technological zenith casting a shadow on the imperium itself
Because da boiz is best
Was just about to post this. The War in Heaven is a precursor tale extra in the way only 40K delivers.
@@catalyst9955 was about to say- the Imperium is frequently discovering advanced technology beyond their understanding that was created by _themselves._
I've been toying with a spin on the Precursor trope where their downfall turns out to have been a memory wipe inflicted upon them in a war where even their allies decided they were taking things too far.
The precursors aren't "gone"; they're all still there, they just don't realize that the ancient abandoned ruins they've been studying, dismantling, and reverse-engineering for the tech and magic on which they found their civilization belonged to them to begin with.
In a lot of ways, this is what Halo did. The deep lore of Halo gets really weird.
Not to discourage you. This is still a really fun idea and definitely a good one to explore
Interesting idea
This is such a cool idea because of the spin it puts on real world archeology. The reason we get ancient aliens type thoughts about past civilizations and cultures is because someone decided that human development must be liner and we-the-now, must therefor be better and more advanced than we-the-then. Current archeology is growing out of this hangup it started with and that's all to the good imo, but early archeology fan-fic about ancient civilizations is wild and I love it.
Best of luck with your writing!! I'm excited for how it turns out.
Isn't that the plot of the anime "The Big O?"
This is a similar background to the anime Big O.
It follows a PI type character with an android assistant/maid and he pilots a big gundam type thing.
one thing that a show did to answer "what happened to the precursors?" is pretty interestingly done in Heroic age, where its mentioned in the first minutes of the first episode, that the precursors straight up left to another universe and challenged the lesser races to come find them.
and then these races immediately started shit because they couldn't agree who is the new Precursor lol
Good show, though. Main music theme from the into is absolutely epically glorious
My favorite example of this is in FromSoft games, since you are often looking at the lost artifacts of a fallen society (and using those artifacts to beat up its last remnants). The lore of a FromSoft game is often trying to piece together exactly why this particular society beefed it so hard that everyone became zombies or whatever.
Souls Lore is basically very violent Archeology
I like how Souls lore goes from as deep and obscure as "crumbling civilizations, Gods overthrowing dragons in turn overthrown by undead in turn overthrown by age of darkness all in the name of staving off heat death and embracing the duality of creation..."
... To "this wizards name is Big Hat Logan. Guess why."
@@boota2474 ...It's cuz of his shoes, isn't it?
In Dr. Stone, modern day humans are the ancient precursors when everybody in the entire world turned into stone. To the primitive people, modern day science and technology is like sorcery to them, they've never even seen materials like glass, iron or paper before, so they fear it. All they know is something turned those people into stone, they got stories and legends to go on but that's it. Our hero, Senku uses his scientific reasoning to figure out the mystery of what happened to his civilization 3700 years ago.
I love the references to the dwemer of elder scrolls. "Incomprehensible bull" is very succinct in describing them, especially when the most widely supported theory is that they all simultaneously thought themselves out of existence immediately after flipping the on switch of their artificial god.
I refer to population wide whoopsies as "pulling a Karsus"
"thought themselves out of existence immediately after flipping the on switch on their artificial god" makes me immediately think about the death of art because of a flood of AI plagiarism machines. XD
It's not _necessarily_ any more supported than them ascending or being transmuted into the skin of the Brass God. From what we -- and notably, basically none of the actual characters in the Elder Scrolls universe itself -- can figure, if they had actually zero-summed (the term for that kind of "thinking themselves out of existence") then they would have been erased from existence a whole lot more comprehensively. (And yes, that _is_ actually possible, from also erasing all memory of them, all the way to making it so they had never existed at all.) Elder Scrolls lore gets weirder and less certain the deeper you dig. So... yeah, pretty incomprehensible. A very large part of the point of the Dwemer is that we don't and can't know exactly what happened to them, I'd argue. There's not actually a definite answer, on purpose.
@@jemolk8945 you are absolutely correct. Every possible answer for the dwemer does have some sort of hole in it somewhere, including all the in-universe theories. I can't remember where I found it (and for all I know it was Michael Kirkbride who said it and he technically isn't a writer anymore) but the Dwemer were intentionally written to be impossible to figure out. The only reason I say most widely accepted is because most TH-camrs in the TES fandom and the guy who did the New Whirling School website seem to accept it as the main explanation for their disappearance.
@@daltonfreeman6551 True -- but I think that is, in itself, less an indication of what's most reasonable to believe (as suggested by "best supported"), and more an indication that a lot of people, including in the TES fandom, are really, _really_ uncomfortable with ambiguity being what we're left with, and this was the answer they found easiest to rationalize as "best." People tend to prefer concrete answers -- even when the thing they're looking at makes it clear that none can exist.
For my part, I prefer to headcanon that they succeeded, and ascended -- but I recognize that this is just headcanon, and no more concretely true than any other idea. I just personally prefer what I can draw from that version of the story. I therefore consciously choose to lean most heavily on the evidence for this interpretation -- and find it rather annoying when that gets ignored in favor of a consensus that is, to be fair, no _worse_ supported, but also no better, being _the_ explanation rather than merely _an_ explanation.
"Sir! The Leopards-Eating-Peoples'-Faces Device has gone haywire!"
Well, I can't stop cackling now!
Thanks for including a couple halo clips in here. Their lore is so tied up in precursors that they have several precursor species, one of which is called precursors.
I wad half-watching while on a walk so may have missed them. Which ones where?
@Dervalanana i don't remember exactly. She doesn't actually talk about Halo, just has some background images from the Halo animated films in montage. I wanna say it was towards the end.
@@afkathisguy hmm, only thing I'm seeing are some horizon zero dawn images. Though I can see how the holoprojection there could be mistaken for cortana or another halo AI
edit: ah, 2D animation. nvm
I feel like it would be interesting if you did a trope talk episode on the "Heroes don't kill" trope, just because it's a trope that I feel everyone has opinion on and it's one that as a very wide history to it.
Absolutely. This needs to happen.
I think "I don't like to do that/I'm afraid to" and "I hold unto personal ideals I want to uphold for myself" are reasons enough that should be understood.
I think a more appropriate trope talk would be one personal codes or something
Here’s my stance: If a dog has Rabies, no amount of love or compassion is going to make it better, and refusing to put down a rabid dog is a danger to yourself and everyone nearby.
But with that being said, you shouldn’t take joy in putting down a rabid dog, this was a creature that through no fault of it’s own has lost control of faculties and communal instincts and is now violently lashing out people that could have been part of its pack or family. So putting down a Rabid dog should be done with dignity it deserves, because putting down a rabid dog is about keeping people safe, not a hate of rabid dogs.
With that being said, a dog that bites isn’t always Rabid and hopefully with time can be made better. If you’re actively looking out for dogs to put down and getting upset when a dog doesn’t have rabies and was trained by an abusive owner, and gets taken away by animal welfare to be rehabilitated, maybe you should check if you’re not foaming at the mouth yourself.
Also, if you’re dealing with a rabid dog, call animal control, because they’re professionals and are supposed to handle rabid dogs, not you, rabid dog hunting vigilante.
Wait, didn't they already make something like that? Actually, I think it might have just been mentioned as part of their batman detail diatribe. If I'm remembering right.
"This just a rapture in a weird hat" is my favorite sentence in this video
The ascended being trope always reminds me of the Taoist Immortal fashion trend in the 3rd to 6th centuries AD in China. Various "elixirs" - mixtures of toxic metals and mushrooms - were taken to allow the spirit to become "Immortal", leaving behind that pesky mortal shell. Descriptions sometimes included what a disgusting mess was left when friends finally found the physical husk that was left behind. The metal poisoning didn't bother the maggots, apparently.
Outer Wilds is my favorite example of a precursor civilization, because all the Nomai are individuals and you can track their personal arcs rather than them all being faceless ancestors
spoilers:
It's also an interesting case of the 4th type of precursors, those that get struck by a huge calamity. The Nomai weren't really hubristic, in fact they were survivors of a crash. The rest of Nomai civilization is still alive at the end of the game, and it's only the ruins of one clan that we explore in game. They had highly advanced tech, but they never got anywhere near where they were before and had to rebuild everything from the ground up. Their tale is one of survival and persistence that nevertheless got trumped by the cosmos. It wasn't their fault. That's just how things go.
I think their story is even anti-hubristic. If Eskall had just waited like five minutes before warping to the signal they would never have crashed and subsequently wiped out by the Interloper but then they would never have given us the tools to observe the Eye to make a new universe. In a sense, their "hubris" was the right thing to do in the end, even if they never knew.
Science compels us to (redacted)!
Exploring the homes of the Nomai, learning the context that they're all dead and them learning about the end before perishing makes listening to their theme hit harder. It's all very sad. Allthough (SPOILER), you can find a suviving Nomai who were stuck on a hidden planet. She even joins you during the end.
Spoilers for both OG Outer Wilds and the Echoes of the Eye DLC:
This all makes a very great deal of sense, because one of Outer Wilds' themes is that all things end, but each end is not *the* end. Each participant can (and should!) pass the torch to the next, and make something beautiful, despite the individual's not surviving to see it.
There's two moments that made me love the Nomai as people.
One is a terrible joke made by one of the apprentices in Timber Hearths core mine.
The other is a Nomai grieving over the loss of their partner in Brittle Hollow.
Both of them made them so relatable, even with such advanced technology. And I can't think of any other game that does that.
Doofenshmirtz voice: The rapture?
(the rapture puts on a weird looking hat)
PRECURSOR rapture?!??
How unexpected and by unexpected I mean COMPLETELY EXPECTED
Shoutout to that time a Disney Junior show did this! In Elena of Avalor, the main characters live in in the Hispanic-inspired kingdom of Avalor, but there are many ruins and relics from the ancient, indigenous South American-coded civilisation of Maru. The Maruvians were a prosperous society with advanced magical abilities. Now they're extinct. How did that happen? Surely not colonialism and genocide on the Avaloran ancestors' part? Nope, this is Disney Jr, it's not nearly that bad. The people all just died to save the world from eldritch horrors! The Shadows of the Night, as the Maruvians called them, are evil spirits/gods (one of them can literally control time) who invaded the nation to conquer and destroy it. The best sorcerer was able to banish them back to their home dimension - not kill, injure or depower them in any way, just relocate them - but it required such a strong spell that the entire human populace was "sent to the spirit realm" as collateral damage. That's how powerful these villains are. We learn this from the sorcerer's ghost, before Princess Elena finally lets her soul pass on by sealing off the magical crystal she's been guarding. The one she used to accidentally KILL HER OWN PEOPLE. Naturally, the Shadows return in the series finale and the heroes have to defeat them without killing everyone. There's even a Maruvian survivor revealed near the end. I love the series because despite the young target demographic, it integrates a number of deep, dark and emotional tropes like this very well.
“There had been uncountable kings, empires, inventions, billions of lives lived in millions of countries, monarchies, democracies, oligarchies, anarchies, ages of chaos and ages of order, pantheon upon pantheon of gods, infinite wars and times of peace, incessant discoveries and forgettings, innumerable horrors and triumphs, an endless repetition of unceasing novelty. What is the use of trying to describe the flowing of a river at any one moment, and then at the next moment, and then at the next, and the next? You wear out. You say: There is a great river, and it flows through this land, and we have named it History” -Ursula K LeGuin
*Technically*, when the Númenoreans invaded Valinor, the gods (Valar) actually worried that the invasion of paradise was going to work, so they surrendered their active guardianship of the world. It was capital-G God (Eru Illúvatar) who killed the army, sank Númenor, and made the world round. This was known as the Akallabêth, "Downfall", or (of course) Atalantë in Quenya.
...Real subtle, Professor Tolkien.
@harmonic1012 To be fair, he was writing his whole story from the invented voice of "I translated this from an ancient chronicle myths" so it would make sense for a version of the Atlantis myth to show up somewhere. Still, it's one of the few cases of Tolkien going "I'm trying to make this as obvious I possibly can".
It wasn't being subtle. The original version is called The Lost Road and was explicitly intended to be an Atlantis story. It was basically rejected by Allen and Unwin for not being a good follow-up after The Hobbit. It was a *time travel* story.
And true to form, his buddy C.S Lewis tossed any pretense to subtlety out the window and just said "Atlantis, or Numenor as it was called" in the last book of his Space Trilogy.
I love that Tolkien just couldn't get the time travel aspect to work - not with The Lost Road, not with The Notion Club Papers. He was almost incapable, it seems, of writing "not Middle-earth".
As far as I remember, the term "Atalante" was a complete accident. Numenor of course is a spin on the Atlantean myth, but Tolkien really wanted to be more subtle. However, by the time he wrote that story, Quenya was already well-developed and it just so happened that he has established 'talat-' to be a root word for 'fall'
Props to Mass Effect's use of this trope, not only that when you actually find a Prothean to ask about the before times he's great at reflecting a cultural worldview which isn't always great and thus makes them feel more real, but he mentions the before before times, that the Protheans had their own precursors, the Inusannon, who basically served the same purpose to the Protheans which the Protheans serve to modern galactic civilization, highlighting the cycle the Reapers have forced galactic society into. I guess I thought of this because the background music in this video made me think of Vigil's theme.
Also yeah, no way Laputa wasn't getting a shoutout.
Well, we knew that the Protheans were just the last part of a cycle in the first game, but more we get to meet the originals in the third game
I also liked that the protheans ancient-aliensed the Asari. Like humans developed agriculture on their own, but the Asari didn't, lol
@@nebulan Is that so surprising though ? If we were those few scientists who survived on Ilos, and knew our species was doomed, you bet your arse we'd chose the planet of blue alien-compatible beauties to spend the last years of our lives !
I also appreciate that Javik essentially deconstructs the romanticized image of the Protheans from the first game by illustrating that they were essentially the Roman Empire, with "Prothean" being less a singular species and more akin to calling oneself a "Roman" - part of the empire. They were conquerors and slavers who studied "primitive races" with the expectation that those they didn't help to guide & foster wouldn't actually be able to emerge as space-faring civilizations of their own ("The lizard people [evolved]? ...They used to eat flies"). Javik himself only finds purpose in avenging his people for their destruction as the last surviving Prothean, possibly even going off to **** himself because he finds it the only fitting fate for him. He's the nihilism Shepard must resist, or perhaps even convince to change his mind, characterizing the thematic struggle between the Star trek-like optimism of the first game with the peaking despair of the third game, the possibility of a Reaper-less future v. the many graves they filled throughout history.
@@thirdcoinedge While the Protheans really weren't as good as assumed before we get Javik's testimony, it's important to remember that Javik still isn't exactly a reliable narrator. He makes no attempt to hide his biases, and the fact is that he never knew what the Prothean civilization was like before the Reaper's came. He was born nearly 2 centuries after the Reaper invasion, and raised from birth to be a weapon of vengeance. He's been "normal" (as opposed to Reaper based) indoctrinated his entire life to be the way he is, which is to either reestablish Prothean dominance after the Reapers are gone or to go out taking as many Reaper forces with him as possible.
7:43 I love that Halo did Option 1 and Option 2 at the same time. The Precursors were "destroyed" by the Forerunners. Then thousands of years later, the Precursors's "dead" cells re-animate and return as The Flood and are such a horrific threat to all life that the Forerunner wipe themselves out with the Halos. And in the original story Bungie was telling, the Forerunner were Human.
I’m replaying the two Horizon games right now, and it’s such a good example of this. I was tickled to see the clips you used.
That they highlight individuals who make individual choices within the larger cultural and technological legacies makes it feel real. It’s the way history happens. It’s part of why I replay these games, because that dance between individual and collective, new and old, the failed and the as-yet unbowed, it’s fascinating. I love it when creators get it right.
These are always thought provoking bangers.
I think Metroid has a pretty interesting take on Precursors. The Chozo have all the hallmarks: lived a long time ago, created a bunch of cool and/or evil stuff, the works. But, the Chozo only started their fall relatively recently. As a race of warrior bird people, they attained near immortality. However, after thousands of years, they realized that they were too old to lay eggs anymore. So, they begin taking a more passive role on the galactic stage. And they are still around, they just like staying out of the public eye.
I never even considered species wide menopause as a side effect of achieving immortality.
Metroid is like the only series where the protagonist, a human approximately in her 20's or 30's, is the legitimate heir to the precursor civilization by virtue of having been adopted by them just before their fall.
its entirely possible i missed something in my hours and hours of looking at metroid lore but what in gods name are you talking about
@@Punaparta and genetically modified with a bit of their DNA to survive the harsh environment of the adoptive planet.
a lot of ancient precursors are the writer putting an appropriately themed glove on before reaching down with the hand of god and shaping the setting the way they see fit.
Shhhh... don't expose us like this. The reader will scream this is a deus ex-machina and not something foreshadowed.
The Fallout series has an odd kind of twist on Precursors -- they're us. Or at least, they're the alternate timeline version of us, in a world that diverged when the Bikini Atoll h-bomb test never happened and the world never fell out of love with the power of the atom (hence, also, no Godzilla, because Godzilla is basically America in a lizard suit and was directly inspired by the Bikini Atoll test). Most of the lessons learned in the game are about how bad an idea it is to try to cling to or reclaim the past, because the path the past was on led to the atomic destruction everyone is trying to survive in. The tagline of the games is the key lesson: "War; War never changes.". Human beings, given the ability to wage planet disrupting war, will do it over and over and over again, because in the Fallout universe, they never learn the lesson.
Robert Silverberg did a 2-book series on the opposite of that (At Winter's End)....spoiler warning....
....survivors of a future apocalypse assumed they were human but it turns out they were apes and the humans were extinct.
As long as the franchise makes money. Also, in the words of Solid Snake, "War... has changed."
@@louisduarte8763 I love when seemingly directly-contradictory statements aren't actually mutually exclusive due to context.
It's like "nothing is true" from Assassin's Creed and "everything is true" from The Secret World. The titular creed of the Assassins is about the importance of personal responsibility in the face of the fact that societal rules are all just made up, and TSW's tagline is about all the things lurking beneath what humans accept as reality.
(Insert State of Matter Here) Snake is similarly correct in a way that does not contradict Ron Perlman's iconic narration. Because one's talking about the *how,* and the other about the *why.*
Similar szenario‘s with some future Humanity being the ancient precoursors are also (spoilers)…
Horizon (Basically Humanity gets killed by out of controlly self replicating military robots using organic material as fuel)
Xenoblade 1&2 (An artifact providing infinite energy turned up and was then during a war used by a scientist in a mix of desperation and curiosity to create a new universe, leaving earth in ruins.) (Thinking about it, technically in Xenoblade 3, the cultures of the first two games are the ancient precursors, but uniquely, the goal there is, to restore the worlds ancient precursors to how they were exactly.)
Point of order, Godzilla is in the Fallout universe, going by the giant footprint you find in one of the first games. 😁
Reminds me of a response a friend of mine once gave - he was being asked about some unfinished Lore for his setting, and while previously he had left some precursor-y bits around, constant questions had led to fleshing them out a bit. Eventually this led to the founding of the precursor civilization, and going for an epic level of "this is how old somethings are", it was revealed that the precursors had, themselves, built their civilization upon the remnants of an even older race of precursors. When this began to spiral into curiosity about that new group, the flatly responded: "Its precursors all the way down."
The Dragonlance setting for D&D actually has a really interesting version of this, where the thing that killed the precursors was absolutely self inflicted and hubristic, and everyone knows it and doesn't want to touch it with a 10 foot pole. But I think a big part of that is that the stories a lot of us know take place only 300 or so years after the event that destroyed that society, so it's still kinda fresh in the cultural memory, compared to the usual thousands of years for this trope.
A lot of post-apocalyptic stories (especially if the apocalypse happened before living memory) essentially cast modern humans as the precursors. They enjoyed the fruits of incomprehensibly advanced technology, shaped the world to their whims and even ventured into the stars....and then it all went horribly wrong somehow, and made the world we're living in right now.
Just imagine being a medieval peasant seeing the ruins left behind by your Roman ancestors and by the time you came along all the history and knowledge had been lost leaving you to piece together what happened. Really gives you plenty to work with when it comes to storytelling
Image even 100 years or so, many bulding, and homes that have survived will become that. Hell image what the internet would be in future archeological studies
@@compatriot852 Being in Britain in the early Dark Ages must have been incomprehensible.
You and your family live humbly among the dead wealth of the old world. Ruined villas that your great-grandfathers witnessed alive now crumbling, with their marble walls stolen away by time and hungry new builders, miles of fields lying fallow for a century. A city, grander than you can possibly imagine, rotting at the end of the Thames. A city so eldritch that even the German invaders seem to fear it. A city that may be great again, but for now is only a corpse.
There's an absolutely fantastic game about just that! It's called Pentiment and it's by the people who brought us Fallout New Vegas. It is set in a small fictional village of Bavaria in the early to mid 16th century, with some immaculate Name of the Rose vibes and an art style to die for.
Its actually pretty sad, unless the place was declared a holy place/church (aka coliseum and despite this you can see how it looks like a cheese in the present) the most common thing was that those ruins ended up used as in the best case a refuge for outlaws, hunter and etc, as free wall for you new house (in the case of city and castle walls) and the worst free building materials for houses, churches and etc.
Sadly people just started to care about the past recently
@@Rebhussy I would rephrase that as "Sadly people could only *afford* to care about the past recently."
From what I can tell, our ancestors were just as curious as we are, but survival was legit harder then, and often won the fight for resources.
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desart. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
No thing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Gilgamesh
-Gilgamesh, probably
Ozymandias was the Greek name for Ramses II. One of his sons invented Egyptology, and had plans to renovate the Great Pyramids because they were already rundown.
Percy Shelley mentioned
One of my favorite poems.
My favorite version of the “can God create a rock so heavy he can’t lift it” question is the one from the Simpsons: “can God make a burrito so hot he can’t pick it up”
1:42 I misheard you as, “And wool probably wouldn’t exist” and I was so confused why understanding other people would kill all the sheep 😂😂😂
My favorite version of this is Bug Fables where bugs have a sprawling society in what is just a backyard of an abandoned house and the humans, known to the bugs as Giants, are just gone with no real knowledge on what happened
If the Dead Lander Omega's hand is any indication, humans might not be gone, but arguably have an even worse fate...
Funnily enough Pikmin does the same thing. I guess humans as the ancient precursors is another example.
I think it's two tropes in one. One, the small critters story, where small critters (mice, bugs, elves, etc) living in one's floorboards. Two, ancient precursors.
@@themythosarchives7520 Same with Splatoon, since we're bringing Nintendo properties into the conversation.
9:30 Metroid Prime had an interesting take on the “ascended to a higher plane” precursors. The Chozo colony on Tallon 4 foresaw a “corruption” befalling the planet, and ascended to a higher plane. When said corruption, a meteor full of Phazon, landed, it actually brought several of the Chozo back into the physical world and drove them insane, leading to the Chozo ghosts you have to fight later in the game.
I had this same thought! Most Chozo in Metroid have simply died out or disappeared without explanation, but Prime explains the Tallon IV chozo disappearance exactly like this.
@@Treebohr Honestly, the Chozo are also unlike most precursors because their mass disappearance happened fairly recently in-universe. The Tallon IV Chozo ascended around 50 years ago, the Zebes Chozo that raised Samus only died around 10-15 years before Zero Mission, and the Thoha and Mawkin tribes in Dread were similarly wiped out around that time frame.
To me the best real world analogy to the precursor trope is how medieval Europe viewed ancient Rome. There were definitely a few people who knew that those giant ancient buildings were built by humans and not giants, but for most people, the ruins were mysterious places that made for convenient building material sources.
Rome was perhaps a bit too familiar to medieval Europe; a closer analogue may be the perspective Greece of antiquity had of Mycenaean Greece. This was their own ancestors, yet with the gulf of the Bronze Age Collapse between them they conceived the towers of old as having been built by the Cyclopes because surely only the Cyclopes had the strength to move such enormous boulders (hence Cyclopean masonry).
@@LordInsane100complete with mysterious eldritch force that wiped them out: “the sea people”
@@LordInsane100 when you think about how the oldest surviving song literally starts with "in the old days, before the old ones learned to lit up the fire to make bread" or something like that
that's Sumerians, our "Capital P" Precursors
and they were already singing about precursors
it's quite literally is all precursors all the way down
"Sir! The Leopards-Eating-People's-Faces device-- it's gone haywire!"
"My god..."
😂 thank you for taking a hard reverse right turn into the ridiculous.
My favorite implementation of this is in the Halo series. Throughout the main games there are references to the Forerunners, an ancient universe spanning race that created the Halo Installations as terrariums for studying and preserving life, as well as superweapons to wipe the universe clean of life in order to starve our the Flood, a parasitic zombie fungus type race.
However, getting into the books we learn that the Forerunners have their *own* ancient universe spanning civilization that came before them called the, well, Precursors. The Precursors are so ancient compared to the Forerunners that their history only exists in mythology and legend, but it turns out the Flood are the last remnants of the Precursors that died off millions of years before. The universe is so huge and so old that the ancient precursors have their own ancient precursors, and those precursors became their own descendants.
I think the Nomai from Outer Wilds is my favorite example of this trope. Their mark is left ALL over the world and the whole game is basically finding out “what happened to these guys?” The have both advanced tech and ancient looking murals all over their ruins. Also both their swirly text and the translation device you use on it look sick.
One important thing to remember with advanced precursor tech is that even if some of the precursors still live, they wont necessarily know anything about how the tech works or how to replicate it. Imagine picking out 1000 random people and asking them to make a smartphone or even just a combustion engine.
God I sure do love when a Sci-Fi series goes on too long and we start giving the Precursors Percursors until we eventually reach the point where the most Precursory of precursors is Humanity.
That'd be some xenofiction type thing
And occasionally the precursor of a precursor is officially named “the precursors” because at some point writers lose the ability to come up with creative names
@@mariustan9275Or Halo. 😂
@@Beanie28i dont know which series besides HALO did the most of "Precursors of the Precursors of the Precursors..."
@@madkoala2130Warhammer 40k sort of does it with the Old Ones and the Necrons and to a lesser extend the Eldar
Thank you for this! One of my DND players surprised me by saying their character's goal is to understand some ancient history in my world building and I have been desperately scrambling for ideas to flesh out the history and create a compelling arc for its research and discovery! This has given me so much inspiration!
Having this play is so much better imo as a kind of audio book more than a proper video.
For me videos like yours are awesome but feeling like I'm watching it makes me feel forced so I leave and don't come back.
But listening to it gives me the same pros but another of drawing my characters while getting the knowledge and enjoyment much easier into my brain
Ah, just in time for my Legend of Zelda hyperfixation phase. First we got the detail diatribe, and now a reminder of how old everything is
I was JUST watching the archelogical exploration of TOTK on the Stream playlist last night lol. This is aptly timed.
i love that there's so goddamn MANY precursors in that series. Some of them are still around like the Sheikah, and don't seem at all interested in reclaiming their old glory. They're seen as wise but not because of that.
Then suddenly you have the Zonai who were apparently the ancestors of Hylia itself.
And of course the fact that Hylians, Gorons, Zora, and Gerudo are so old that they're their OWN precursors, just so much has been lost over the millennia as to make the ancestral past almost entirely unknown to the present day
@@BJGvideos yea even skyward sword has a whole ass past even though it's the first story in the series chronologically
One of my favorite tropes is when characters get handed something from a _much_ higher level of tech than they should have access to, and proceed to... bumble around with it. Fail to understand its functions beyond the basic stuff, use it in all kinds of unintended ways, and generally have no clue what they're doing. That has so much potential for both comedy and drama that it never fails to make me smile. Bonus points if there's a precursor or similar still around to facepalm at the mess
Reminds me of a line from one of the Ben 10 movies.
"What have you been doing with the omnitrix? Smashing rocks?"
I love how that feels in Caves of Qud. It's a VERY junk-punk world and even though Relics from a Before Time are everywhere, you need to study them to have any idea what they are or how they work.
Like, sometimes you pick up a relic and it's called a "Bunch of pipes" and it looks like a gun.. Nope, it's just a collapsible taser rod.
Or the reverse "Oh, man, this thing is just a folding chair, I mean look at the sprite... WAIT, what do you mean it's a bazooka?!"
There’s definitely one bit in _Assassin’s Creed 3_ where Juno tells you off for humanity having spent 75 millennia squabbling over the Isu’s trash and putting off using the wonderful doohickeys to deal with the Sun being about to explode again until like a month beforehand
It's aliens instead of precursors, but Roadside Picnic is a short story that does this well.
"Could God create a rock so heavy he couldn't lift it only the answer is yeah and it killed him it's kind of the worst" thats great one😂
I wasn’t ready for you to tackle ancient precursors as a topic by starting with the integral experience of individuality. This is exactly the rich depth I watch your videos for
I love your content. The way you make fun of and celebrate these tropes at the same time is just so great.
I just found this video inside an ancient cave; it's crazy how much you ancestors knew about narrative tropes! I bet this discovery will have no consequences on my simple little life and society as a whole
The "First Ones" from Babylon 5 are a great example of mixing and matching every aspect of this trope into one story. They're the ones who stepped aside, but also returned as antagonists, but also left dangerous technology behind, but also left some immortals among us, but also became arrogant and fought a war against each other, but also a bunch of other stuff. And on top of that, there's an even older First One who preceded the other First Ones!
And all it took to make them f*** off was two people saying “get off our lawn”
@@A-Legitimate-Salvage and at least one ship worth of dead aliens, who took the hit for the two people.
SDF Macross has a rather good precursor idea. While gone they sealed their great enemy that destroyed them, left a living relic in the soldiers that are the immediate threat of the first series and ultimately it's about the other successors ( the species that are born from their backup plan) to study the tech of the previous civilization and the ramifications of their own problems compounding it.
All Tomorrows has multiple precursors in various roles
@@A-Legitimate-Salvage and to start to have the technology to back up the command. Babylon 5 shows what happens when the babies start to be able to push back against the precursors.
This might be the best trope talks you've done so far, in part because the social philosophy implied by the topic, and how well you touched on it. More like this please!
Love whenever a Trope Talk starts with a gentle reminder of the shared existence we have
Precursor civilizations are probably one of my favorite tropes that I will like no matter how much it’s overused. Something about the melancholic wonder of ancient ruins just does it for me.
Jokes, pets, and souvenirs are a perfect way to see that people never change
"I was there"
What is long, thin, hard, hangs by a man’s thigh, and often enters and leaves a hole?
.
.
.
.
.
A door key!
I love how may times we saw Dwarven Ruins from Skyrim as background footage, the Dwemer really do fill so many roles with this trope.
"Where are all the grownups?"
Is a theme associated with SciFi, Futurism, and the Fermi Paradox. One answer explored in the Schlock Mercenary comic is, they're all running away from the galaxy before a younger upcoming civilization does something really bad that obliterates everything. It's a very interesting twist on ancient civilizations, and could apply to Fantasy as much as SciFi.
Yeah, I like Schlock Mercenary's take. And also, like, the grownups are smart and all, but sometimes the new kid can also come in and accidentally make a really good point about how to adult better. (And because it was Tagon's idea, it was *rigorously* simmed.)
holy sh!t...I'll come back to watch this a couple hundred times. you've done it again, red. you've done it again. the music was a lovely touch, too!!
Kirby somehow has the same precursors have two different endings depending on how you look at it.
because Forgotten Land puts them squarely in the 'ascended' territory, with them abandoning their planet after not only winning when the eldritch horrors come knocking, but then using said eldritch horror to unlock fast travel.
flash forward an unknown amount of time, and those exact same people who ascended somehow manage to still die off and leave behind cool things to explore and occasionally beat up.
God I love Kirby lore.
You haven't even mentioned the really crazy part of that. The voice over in the facility states those precursors went to a "land of dreams", as in Dreamland, the setting of the Kirby games, Implying the denizens of Planet Popstar are the distant descendants of those precursors.
I had to scroll so far to find something Kirby related. The Ancients are the first thing I thought of.
Halo has a few examples as you showed with the Forerunners and Flood. The Flood are essentially the corrupted DNA of the original Precursors, who were nearly wiped out by the Forerunners in a classic case of 'What could go wrong with trying to wipe outs the gods out of spite?'
And the strange thing is that in 1 way or another, they all survived. The Flood are some the biggest antagonists of the first 3 games and a lot of the literature or spin offs like Halo Wars 1&2, the Forerunners tech is nearly in perfect condition and their monitors carry on their legacy, and there's even at least 1 still living; uncorrupted Precursor running around in the EU.
Edit: I forgot about how ancient humanity lived alongside the Forerunners.
Not to mention that the Forerunners were originally humans before Halo 3 retconned that piece of lore.
@@TheSpaceCommunistthis statement will start fights
I thought Forerunners were alongside ancient humans.
@@TheSpaceCommunist "Humans are forerunner" - Guilty Spark 343.
Then the forerunners show up as enemies in Halo 4 instead of just being a long dead civilization. Who thought that was a good idea?
@@FirstnameLastname-bp2pg Whoops forgot about that, thanks for the reminder.
13:24 lets also not forget Sauron achieving one of the greatest player-hater moments of all time by fooling the Numenorians (who literally defeated him and Morgoth in battle) into making him their religious leader and then basically allowing him to gaslight the entire civilization into thinking God had abandoned them. Truly an aspirational hater.
The only flaw in his plan not considering God would intervene directly. Internalized his own propaganda too much it seems.
@@merrittanimation7721 truly a pyrrhic victory
@@merrittanimation7721 Well, he got Numenor to be destroyed, so I'd say that is a win.
I have never been more excited for the podcast episode discussing this video, between you and Blue! The real world examples are so much fun and I can't wait to see how they bounce off against the fantasy examples that you're presenting! Great video as always!
i actually like how the Elder Scrolls games deal with the Dwemer differently from Morrowind to Skyrim. In Morrowind they were a lesson in hubris. We have people (like vivec and the tribunal) who won over them, and grew up in a world where they were an active part of the world. Fast forward over 200 years, and all those people are long dead and the knowledge of who or what the dwemer were, how they were vanished, its all gone from the populace. Here, the dwemer becomes a creepy mystery. i like the idea of how the meaning of a lost civilisation changes depending on the time away from it - in the same way a person’s death takes different meaning through the decades and centuries.
5:30 Necrons: *Laughs in get off my lawn.
The game Enderal adds a neat twist to this trope that I'm not sure I've seen elsewhere.
The standard "medieval fantasy" setting doesn't just have an ancient lost society with mechanical ruins everywhere, it has dozens, if not hundreds! There's been a cycle of apocalyptic end times happening to civilizations like clockwork going back so far, the modern people didn't even know about the previous ones until they found the last group's notes on it.
The entire main quest line is trying to stop this apocalypse from happening, despite knowing that all of your precursors had better timelines for magical and technological development, and still couldn't stop it.
I love the version of this trope where there's very few surivivors of the precursors but they don't rememeber or havent internalised the very flaws that caused their downfall still after so long, so when they get an opportunity to tell the characters about their own time, they wax poetic about a utopia that never existed, bonus points if we then get to go abck in time and see the flaws ourselves.
3:34 Stargate.... thank you for the little nod and the continued references throughout, that show was my childhood.
Love that you included so much Stargate clips/references, it was the first setting I thought of when I saw the video title
Was not expecting Stargate Atlantis to show up, but I'm here for it.
And sometimes the precursor has a precursor! And the shattering of the first race was because a guy gave a bird depression so hard she started to purge life
Remember us. Remember that we once lived.
No more shall man have wings to bear him to paradise. Henceforth he shall walk.
Lands that stretched on forever. Skies one could drown in. The heartbeat of nature, silent yet strong. And amidst it all a people. Beacons of light and life. Laughter that warmed my heart like naught else before
Im so obsessed with her voice its so chaotic yet soothing
This is one of my favorite trope talk videos
My favorite version of the ancient precursor is the one that destroyed themselves with superweapons that *definitely aren't* nuclear weapons, and whose fate *definitely isn't* a cautionary tale for our own civilization that has the capacity to make itself into a long-lost precursor in fifteen minutes
I love this, I also love when you see the conflicting ideas about the precursors because no one knows for sure. And that's satisfying because it has a comparison to modern anthropology and archeology, we don't know how much we don't know.
"Try not to die the same way" is such a wonderful way to articulate thw whole trope! I love it!