Ever read a book, watched a movie, or played a video game that you love the universe/world so much that you want to move there and live there forever?
Star Trek. I want to live in a post-scarcity society with incredible technology.
I’ll see your Star Trek and raise you The Culture.
The Culture is objectively the safer answer. Living in Star Trek feels like it carries a fairly significant daily risk of being assimilated / used in a Romulan plot / sucked into some weird negative space wedgie / having a console explode in your face for no good reason.
Meanwhile, if you’re in the Culture, you’ve pretty well got it made.
Yeah The Federation has a surprising lack of Space OSHA?
The Culture would be a grand place indeed
thay sounds amazing tbh
Right there with ya. 🖖
How about the Simpsons? A fictitious America where a man can own a house and provide for his family with one job.
Not fictitious. That’s how it was in the late 80’s before the full aftereffects of reaganomics kicked in.
Fine, what’s a TV show based in '80s America? The Americans! Just a nice, stress-free American family life in the suburbs.
Hyrule, preferably the version from Breath of the Wild. I mean, yes there is the whole Ganon thing and one shouldn’t go too close to the castle, but the rest of the kingdom is pretty chill, and apparently you can make an easy living by just lazy foraging in the countryside, or by selling a handful of acorns and bugs at random stables, or by growing a grand total of eight pumpkins.
I’ll take a life as a homeless but well-fed drifter on horseback anytime over … this. gestures vaguely at the current state of the world
For a world that are post apocalyptic, Hyrule sure seems relatively chill tbh. But obviously i will choose pre-apocalyptic Hyrule
Pern!
Although the person who picked the Culture is absolutely on to something.
Wow! I wasn’t the first one! I want a fire-lizard. Granted, I also want a dragon, but that seems overly presumptuous.
The Culture and it isn’t even close.
My thought exactly.
yep
Stardew Valley is pretty laid-back and low-stakes. Relationships are incredibly easy–just give them a fish or a rock or whatever. I could get into it.
I wish someone would try to build a relationship with me by treating me like a Stardew NPC. Do you have any idea how quickly I would grow to love someone if they had a habit of giving me random shiny rocks and vegetables that they grew?
Nice try, truck-kun.
Jumps in front of truck-kun
I like the 40k universe, but fuck actually living in it.
Same with me and the Game of Thrones universe
Good news is you won’t live long anyway
It depends really. Big chunk of Imperial core is living somewhat fine without much of an outside threat. If you’re luckly to be born on a planet that does well economically you may live a happy life of decent sci-fi.
Not every single imperial world is a hive world full of gangs and mutants that experiences an ork invasion, genestealer infestation, and a chaos corruption simultaneously lol.
Reading some of non-spacemarine novels like the Eisenhorn series shows a lot about how common imperial worlds live.
Even without external bad things it’s still not great. You still have the possibility of conscription into the guard. You still have a somewhat feudal government system. Depending on the dominant faction in the sector, you have to deal with their beliefs, on top of not ever appearing heretical. Punishment for heresy can include entire family trees, or entire blocks.
On top of all that, you still have the constant threat of warp storms. They could consume the planet or just block travel to your system. Either is likely a death sentence.
I love the world of TES 3: Morrowind. It’s amazing mixture of green plains, harsh deserts, mountains, swamps, sea shores, islands, hills and all between sprinkled with alien like vegetation. Not sure if I wanted to live there forever (with all the slavery, undead and wild beasts), but ever since I played it for the first time I absolitely fell in love with the world and its atmosphere.
Yeah my first thought is The Elder Scrolls universe as well. Though I’d probably prefer Skyrim’s world, especially as someone who lived too long in a tropical area and misses colder temperature. I think I’d love to live in a cottage in an eternal fall of Riften.
Morrowind VR was incredible
Would you believe that there’s also an Android port of OpenMW? The power of FOSS
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I have it pretty bad for The Elder Scrolls. I’ve returned to the series time and time again for decades now, primarily Morrowind and Skyrim, and spend a huge amount of time each playthrough reading every single book and immersing myself in Nirn and it’s lore. I genuinely feel humbled by all of it, and something about that universe, the depth of its history with its unreliable narrators leaving much to speculation, as well as that immense sea of stars, Masser and Secunda, and the guardian constellations watching over you at night to the overwhelming swells of Jeremy Soule’s music is just profoundly moving to me in a way I can’t quite put into words.
Same, I also mentioned in other reply I feel so comfortable in Riften
LoTR would be hella cool to live in, especially in The Shire.
I would absolutely love to just chill with my hobbit friends, tend to the fields, then either party or have a lovely dinner party at night and head back to my hobbit hole. Then wake n bake in the morning and do it all over again!
One word, Wales.
Instructions unclear - moved to Newport. Not the experience I was hoping for…
If you’ve never been to Fannies Cafe “We’re always open” then you’ve never lived.
My own, tbh. I guess any writer that does escapist type fantasy kinda wants to live there.
But, generally (and in keeping with your question more), not as an adult. When I was younger, absolutely. Xanth was my favorite place in the fictional world for a few years. It seemed like the perfect place to escape the ugliness of the real world.
Would you describe that world to us? Man I still remember having wild imagination as a child… I don’t think I can do that now that I’m older…
honestly, you can! its a skill and if you work at it and practice, your mind can really open up.
Mine?
Well, there’s the back story that thousands of years ago, “something” broke magic here on earth, and doing so broke magic everywhere. That last part matters because there are other worlds, settled by humans that have changed greatly over millennia.
So earth went along without magic for a very long time. It became a myth of its own, a thing that only existed in stories, until believing in is would make you seem crazy. During that time, the gods slept. Without magic to bind the faith of the living to the forces of the universe, the archetypes that the gods represented became only forces, undirected and impersonal, but also more observable as forces.
But magic was broken, not gone. Over time, the fundamental force of magic was building back up. Indeed, there were people that had the ability to perceive such things, though working magic took incredible effort, prolonged rituals, and often great sacrifice.
Towards the end of the 1800s, there were some of those people that could perceive magic and related energies became aware that magic as a force was building. (In the real world, here, that’s when a lot of people became interested in the occult and magic. Stuff like the golden dawn, etc).
But it took a long time for it to “snap” back into place with the other fundamental forces.
The moment it happened was Woodstock. Between the energies of magic coming back, the altered states of the concert goers, and the presence of what are called awakeners, magic, humanity and the world reunited and triggered the return of the first god.
Only it was a goddess, Gaea, mother nature.
This obviously had a world changing effect. When mother nature appears in a gathering that size, then sends her voice across the world, the old paradigms were shifted.
This led to other gods awakening too. All the gods woke up so long as there was at least one person alive that worshipped them, or an awakener was aware of the god having existed in the past or in fiction. Some of the gods that woke up had no worshippers, but because someone with the ability to make the connection between forces and faith thought they should exist or come back, they did.
However, the monotheists were decidedly unhappy. See, not only were their religions in question, but their gods hadn’t awaked in quite the same way as the other gods. The deep connections between the Abrahamic faiths, and the sheer numbers of worshippers made a mess of God/Allah/Jehovah(Yahweh)/Christ. They all came back, but they came back very messy. They had awakeners and worshippers viewing them as different gods, as the same god, and with hugely varying ideas of what those gods were.
This, through a process of anger and hatred led to the first part of the gods wars. One branch of an Abrahamic religion attacked another with not only conventional weaponry, but with magic. The allies of the nation that got attacked rallied, and the world was thrown into chaos.
Now, the story of that is long as hell, and there’s not enough room to cover it. Not suffice it to say that gods fought, and some gods died. As gods died, the power they held accumulated in the victors. This led to a single god of a given thing, like Gaea being goddess of nature, Kwannon being goddess of mercy and healing Jesus being god of peace, Ares god of war, etc.
This left a planet with a pantheon made up of pieces of every religion, massive damage to the landscape, huge loss of population, and a surprising number of gods that were essentially fiction like Cthulhu.
That’s the premise. I’ve been building it and using it for various things since 1991. My home brew ttrpg, a good amount of stories told to friends, and in a few books and shorter fiction now.
Fwiw, I’m almost 50, and I’m still creating stuff. You’re never too old to imagine :)
Hobbington
The movie from studio Ghibli Whisper of the Heart is so beautiful I wish I can live there :(
Ghibli studio man…
One of the only happy tears that happened in my life is probably when I watched Howl’s Moving Castle. The sound track, the beautiful animation… I just can’t
Yeah they really make beautiful movies!
Roshar!
Let’s see how Wind and Truth ends first lol
If it’s a hundred years or so before book events, and not in Vorin kingdoms (Azir maybe?) then sure. Scadrial during Elendel era would offer a better quality of life though.
Do they actually value life? Most of it is feudal which means most individuals don’t have great lives.
Depends on where you end up. There’s a big difference between being Azish vs. Shin vs. Veden vs. Alethi, etc., and even what Highprince you’re under if you’re Alethi.
