If your fantasy late-medieval-esque Europe isn't actually our world

[conuly]

then I guess I can overlook the potatoes, the peppers, and even the vanilla. Sure. They're useful crops, after all, even if there appears to be nothing similar to the Columbian Exchange in this universe.

However, I gotta draw the line at skunks and poison ivy coexisting in the same environment as peacocks and... okay, actually it turns out that my knowledge of native non-domesticated Afro-Eurasian flora and fauna is a bit skimpy, but you know what I mean. What's next, kangaroos?

Relatedly: Hedgehogs live in Europe. Porcupines live in America. I know that they're both prickly, but they're not interchangeable in the environment or, crucially, in stories.

Comments

Also prickly

[tcpip]

Fun fact; the echidna was known in the days of colonial Australia as the "Australian hedgehog".

[ayebydan]

Thiiiiiis. These are the sort of details that take me right out of a story of any sort.

Re: Also prickly

[conuly]

Makes sense!

[conuly]

Seriously, your wise Native American elder is not going to prove a point with a story about hedgehogs - and please, everybody, stop making up "traditional" stories that aren't. You might think your audience won't notice, and you're depressingly likely to be correct, but the ones who do notice that will be even more annoyed than I am about the potatoes.

[veryrarelystable]

I would have thought the other way around. It's nearly 2020; your audience is going to include people outside Europe and North America; a fantasy world shouldn't be limited to biota that happens to be familiar to Europeans and North Americans.

If you're going to mix up the crops, then for consistency's sake isn't it better to mix up the wild biota as well? Have forests where tigers and bears hunt monkeys and wild turkeys. Have penguins in your world's northern oceans. Have tea-gardens in amongst the cornfields in your rural areas. Have bellbirds and fantails competing for nesting sites with robins and skylarks.

Really? America doesn't have hedgehogs?

[mindstalk]

"There are seventeen species of hedgehog in five genera found through parts of Europe, Asia, and Africa, and in New Zealand by introduction. There are no hedgehogs native to Australia and no living species native to the Americas (the extinct genus Amphechinus was once present in North America)."

[veryrarelystable]

Wow. Would never have guessed. I just thought that since North America has shrews and moles, it had to have the other branch of the Insectivoran order as well.

(But yes, entirely different from porcupines, which are herbivorous rodents.)

[conuly]

If you want to set your fantasy in somewhere other than Generic Fantasy Not-Europe, so much the better! But don't set it in Not-Europe and then screw up the flora and fauna.

IRL, "mix all the world's flora and fauna in naturalization schemes and occasional crazy Shakespearean bird releasing festivals" turned out to be several different natural disasters rolled into one. I don't want to see it in fantasyland. Variety is the spice of life, and in order to have it we need to not mix and match our biomes.

[nineveh_uk]

+ 1 This is where Tolkien gets it right with potatoes and tobacco and rabbits in the Shire, because he isn't going for "100% natural flora/fauna" he's going for something that exists on earth and feels not only plausible, but natural to his target audience regardless of whether the Ithilien conies are an invasive species. But whereas there are feral raccoons in Germany, it would be pretty surprising to find them in Rohan, on account of the human population of this section of Middle Earth isn't one that would be importing raccoons.

[negothick]

Tolkien got it right, but mostly by accident. The world of The Lord of the Rings was not Built, it was Accreted or Agglomerated. The landscape of The First and Second Age stories that became The Silmarillion, or the tales set in Numenor is bare, as appropriate for epic. Then he wrote The Hobbit, and then spent 15 years or so fitting the cozy, children's fantasy-style novelist's world of The Shire into what is essentially a pre-apocalyptic Third Age Fallen World of Middle-earth. Along the way, he taught himself how to transform epic into novel--but that's a whole other story.