Web Video / The Templin Institute

Investigating alternate worlds.

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The Templin Institute is a Canadian web series on YouTube created in 2017 by Marc Gerst, creator of the Sins of a Solar Empire Game Mod Dawn of Victory 2289. They are dedicated to "investigating the organizations, figures, and places of alternate worlds"; in practice, they are an Analysis Channel that explains the lore behind various fantasy and science fiction universes, through the Framing Device of a team of interdimensional travelers observing and exploring the universe in question. The show was hosted from 2017 through early 2020 by Larissa Thompson, and since then by Stephen Trafford.

In addition to its explainer videos, the Templin Institute also has a separate series called Incoming in which Marc himself dives into various fictional universes and the tropes therein and explains his own personal thoughts on them. Their second channel, Templin Direct, also publishes Incoming-style short videos about a minute in length.

They are also the creators of the Stellaris fan series Stellaris Invicta, in which they create and lead interstellar human empires. Tropes relating to that series belong on that page exclusively.

In 2023, they announced a new series, The Way of Worldbuilding, in which they try their hand at crafting their own fictional universe. After allowing fans to vote on three proposals, they ultimately went with a reboot of Dawn of Victory 2289, tentatively titled The Orion Arm before they just went with the name Dawn of Victory.

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Tropes:

• Analysis Channel: Most notably in episodes of Incoming, though elements also show up in their main episodes, albeit through a Framing Device of a team of outside observers from another dimension.
• April Fools' Day:
  • Their 2018 April Fools' episode was on the Springfield Box Factory from The Simpsons, a subject matter so dull that even the narrator herself, after growing increasingly bored, simply gave up halfway through and changed the channel.
  • Their 2019 episode was a Bait-and-Switch where they pretended they were finally doing a long-awaited video on the First Galactic Empire from Star Wars... only for it to actually be about a British pharmacy chain called B&T, a lightly fictionalized version of the real-life Boots pharmacy with a bunch of Star Wars references thrown in. The narrator eventually realizes something's weird: namely, they got some of the dates wrong.
  • Their 2021 episode was blatant Product Placement for Papa John's Pizza, very thinly justified by the fact that Papa John's was featured in the Ghostbusters reboot. The narrator immediately starts asking questions, only for Marc to dismiss his concerns.
  • Their 2022 episode covers the SCP Foundation, but abandons the channel's Framing Device and takes an out-of-universe approach to the narration, delivered in the form of a rambling, stream-of-consciousness commentary that frequently goes off-script to request the viewer like, subscribe, and share the video... all overlaid over some generic Minecraft footage. The intro alone takes up four minutes, half the video's runtime.
  • Their 2023 episode was "Ranking the Galactic Powers of Frasier," a prompt that initially leaves Marc confused and asking for something else to do an episode on. He gets "State of the Galaxy in You've Got Mail" and "The Springfield Box Factory Reimagined," both of which he also rejects, then "The Intricate Universe of the SCP Foundation," to which he responds that they already did it last year, then a trolling prompt mocking a previous video they did on the idea of female space marines in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, which causes him to simply Rage Quit.
  • Their 2024 episode was "The Star Wars Universe Doesn't Work," which turns out to be a Musical Episode done in "Hammerstein Mode".
• Card-Carrying Villain: Marc notes in "Naming Your Interstellar Empire" that for a nation to formally call itself a Hegemony would be "almost comically belligerent," and then acknowledges that this describes the Batarian Hegemony pretty well.
• Conditioned to Accept Horror: Discussed in their video on the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Marc argues that all the constant end of the world threats since the Chitauri invasion of New York would eventually give every average human on Earth crisis fatigue to the point they likely wouldn't bat an eye at the Snap.
• Deadpan Snarker: Marc often lays down sarcasm during episodes of Incoming.
• Dystopia Is Hard: As they point out in the video on The Hunger Games, Panem is so incompetent it's a miracle revolt hasn't happened earlier.
• Feudal Future: Discussed in several episodes of Incoming. Marc isn't a fan of "space monarchies" because, in his view, hereditary monarchies are ineffectual and obsolete compared to western-style democracies that reward merit rather than privileges of birthright. He also dislikes using "Empire" as the formal name of a nation, as the term once evoked awe and respect but is today used to refer to oppressive, colonial regimes; most modern nations prefer to use friendlier names, even when they are The Empire in practice.
• Fictional Flag: "The Best & Worst Fictional Flags & Emblems" and its sequel go into detail about how to design these.
• Fix Fic: "The First Order Reimagined" and "The New Republic Reimagined" are the Templin Institute's redesign of the two Star Wars sequel factions to make them more interesting, plausible, and effective than their canon counterparts, while staying true to the existing lore where possible. "The First Order - New Republic War Reimagined" depicts the military conflict between them.
  • The reimagined First Order has the Sith Eternal baked into it from the beginning, in response to fan criticism that the latter didn't have adequate foreshadowing prior to The Rise of Skywalker. The faction is also a meritocracy, and takes a Boring, but Practical approach to warfare — using droids for Cannon Fodder while preserving their trained, organic soldiers — rather than doubling down on Tarkin's "rule through fear" doctrine. The First Order also relies on extensive propaganda campaigns both inside and outside its borders to prepare the galaxy for its crusade against the New Republic (known simply as "the Day"), reflecting the spread of the alt-right in the real world.
  • The reimagined New Republic is more or less unchanged in concept, but has more backstory and emphasis is placed on the idealistic, cooperative elements of its national identity — it actively combats the Empire's xenophobic policies by promoting cultural events on its member worlds, and has redesigned its military to allow more flexible, moral methods. The Resistance is reimagined as being a New Republic Volunteer Group, one of hundreds, comprised of former Rebel Alliance members who have devoted themselves to combating the Remnants of the Empire. When the First Order destroys Hosnian Prome and begins their invasion, the New Republic does not roll over and die, as occurred in canon, but instead forms an emergency government and rallies its forces and its allies, pledging to fight on until the First Order has been completely destroyed, no matter how long it takes.
• The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: Sometimes, the narrators are noticeably affected by their subjects.
  • In the video on the Tyranids from Warhammer 40,000, the moment the narrator starts talking about the Tyranid Tyrant Guard, made with the DNA of the Adeptus Astartes, and notes the implication that this means the Tyrant Guard have some of the DNA of the God-Emperor of Mankind within them, the Inquisition hacks the feed on account of the massive heresy the channel is engaging in.
  • The video on Oceania from Nineteen Eighty-Four sees the feed get hacked by an agent of Big Brother telling the viewer, presumed to be a prole named Michael, to get back to work.
  • The video on the "Event Horizon Incident" tells the viewer that it was never meant to be released, and heavily implies that not only is the universe of Event Horizon connected to that of Warhammer 40,000 (though with exact references to the latter censored out), but that both universes are part of a broader multiverse that includes every other one that they've explored — and that the Institute is not the only institution in this multiverse that has the means to travel between them. And given what is known of the interdimensional beings in the Event Horizon and 40K universes, that suggests that the Institute is not nearly as safe as it thinks. Dr. Emily Taylor, their previous narrator, went insane upon realizing this, leading to her replacement with the current narrator.
  • The video on the USG Ishimura from Dead Space sees the HUD subtly but noticeably corrupted by the influence of the Marker, and some of the "extra" lines in the subtitles (PUT IT BACK THEY ARE WATCHING) imply that the narrator has started to succumb to it as well.
  • In the video on the Garden of Nurgle, the HUD looks to be covered in a green growth, and at the end, Marc sounds as though he's caught some especially horrid cough, implying that Nurgle's corruption managed to get through.
  • The Necron video ends with a case of this when Trazyn the Infinite hijacks the feed during the outro and offers his own brief commentary on the Institute.
  • The video on the United Defense Force from Edge of Tomorrow ends with the "Groundhog Day" Loop rewriting the video's ending, reflecting how the aliens were defeated in the film.
  • In the video on Genestealer Cults, the HUD contains symbols and rhetoric consistent with the cults, and the video's 'sponsor', the Community of Global Wellness, is heavily implied to be a Genestealer Cult itself.
• The Greatest Story Never Told: Invoked in their lore video for the Black Mesa Research Facility. While they go into great detail into the shadowy research corporation's questionable ethics and the unforeseen consequences of their research, any mention of Gordon Freeman - the man who unwittingly contributed but also ultimately stopped the disaster which happened there - is notably conspicious in their complete absence. This is justified by the scale of the organization and the disaster which followed, as well as the fact in-universe there was a cover-up from the government and the facility itself was ultimately nuked, meaning very little information of what exactly happened there as well as those involved would had been known.
• Hard on Soft Science: Discussed and criticized in the Art of Worldbuilding episode on genre. Marc notes how the Mohs Scale of Sci-Fi Hardness often gets used as a measure of quality, with "hard" science fiction treated as superior for being more scientifically accurate and logically consistent while having more to say about humanity and where it's headed, while "soft" science fiction is dismissed as glorified fantasy or fairy tales. He sees this as a terrible way to judge the quality of a sci-fi work, noting that it could just as easily be turned around into a defense of soft sci-fi as thematically deeper and more character-focused and a consequent dismissal of hard sci-fi as emotionally sterile and caught up in showing off the author's scientific knowledge. What's more, he believes that the debate focuses too much on how the physical sciences are presented in a story at the expense of the social sciences and other academic disciplines, comparing it to judging the historical accuracy of a Western by how the mechanics of traveling by wagon are depicted. He cites The Expanse as an example of a hard sci-fi series that's lauded for its scientifically accurate portrayal of space travel with speculative technologies, but one that he feels has a portrayal of politics, society, and the military that's almost as fantastical as Star Wars.
• High Fantasy: Marc isn't a fan, and generally prefers Low Fantasy, though he admits that his knowledge of the genre is fairly shallow outside of the most famous works. In the Art of Worldbuilding episode on genre, he stated that he thinks many High Fantasy works fail to account for the societal repercussions of there being magical forces in their universes that break the laws of physics, as well as people and other entities who can exploit these forces, instead imagining that they'd loosely resemble medieval Europe with wizards and dragons even though magic would logically have an impact on society comparable to the science and industry that, in real life, produced the modern world.
• Homage: One may initially believe the Templin Institute's "interface" in all of their videos to be an original creation. In fact, the design was recreated from Ace Combat Infinity, a 2014 free-to-play Ace Combat game. The interface goes so far as to reference COFFIN, the series prominent Brain/Computer Interface, in the top-right of the screen, and Sky-Eye, the AWACS accompanying the players in Infinity, in the bottom-left of the screen.
• Humans Are Warriors: Marc often comments that humanity's history of warfare has, for better or worse, given us the tools and knowledge necessary to fight and win battles with deadly effectiveness, which is why Hollywood Tactics bother him so much. In one video, he goes so far as to claim that fantasy humans aren't really humans on the basis that they tend to lack an aptitude for warfare. The "martial spirit of mankind" is also a major theme in Stellaris Invicta.
• Idiot Plot: invokedOften critiqued in episodes of Incoming.
  • The episode on Panem from The Hunger Games is especially scathing, starting with the fact that the video is titled "The Most Inept Dystopian Government."
  • "The Dumbest Way To Fight A War" eviscerates The Tomorrow War's future resistance for its reliance on Hollywood Tactics and its sheer disregard for the lives of its soldiers, and Marc opines that any competent military would have either curb-stomped the Whitespikes or used the time portal to prevent their invasion altogether.
• In Spite of a Nail: Toward the end of "What if the Romulans Never Entered The Dominion War", Marc notes that, even without Sisko's manufactured evidence, it would have been in the Romulans' best interest to join the war sooner or later, as they were certainly smart enough to recognize that letting the Dominion conquer the Federation and the Klingons would leave their own empire isolated and vulnerable. Sisko's evidence may have tricked them into the war a bit sooner than they'd planned, but the fact that they were able to attack fifteen Dominion bases so soon after joining the Federation Alliance suggests they'd already been mobilizing in secret, and the end result of the war might have ultimately been the same if Sisko had done nothing.
• Is This Thing Still On?: In the 2021 April Fools' episode, Marc accidentally admits to shilling for Star Wars books in exchange for Disney's money before he notices that the camera is still rolling.
• The Ken Burns Effect: Used throughout their videos.
• Moody Trailer Cover Song: The video on the Lordship of Duloc from Shrek comes complete with Orchestorm's medieval-styled cover of Smash Mouth's "All Star" playing over it, and ends on a pun referencing the song's lyrics for good measure.
• Muggles Do It Better: One episode of Incoming explores whether the Galactic Empire could successfully invade and conquer 21st century Earth. It doesn't go well for the Empire — as Marc explains in detail, Imperial vehicles and weapons are Awesome, but Impractical compared to Earth's, and because modern militaries don't rely on You Have Failed Me to motivate their troops, the average stormtrooper won't fare very well against, say, a US Marine. The only exception to this is the Empire's Star Destroyers, which Earth has no counterpart to, and even then Marc is confident that Earth will find a way to defeat them regardless. Marc closes the video by speculating that after the invasion is defeated, Earth might eventually reverse-engineer hyperdive technology and counter-invade Coruscant itself!
• One Nation Under Copyright: The Incoming episode "Megacorporations Make Poor Governments" deconstructs the idea. Marc argues that this would be a terrible way to organize society, not least of all for the megacorporations themselves; after all, diversifying one's business interests is one of the riskiest things a corporation can do, and taking over the functions of a national government is the ultimate diversification program. Furthermore, the business interests of a corporation can run directly counter to the ideals that most nations are built on, meaning that its soldiers will have little loyalty beyond their paychecks and contracts, especially when the going gets tough. He cites the failure of the British East India Company, a defining real-life historical example of this trope, as a case study. In short, he thinks that there's no money for a corporation in becoming a government, and that a more interesting idea would be to have a megacorporation working behind the scenes to advance its interests at little risk to itself, citing Weyland-Yutani from Alien, the Tyrell Corporation from Blade Runner, and the Iron Bank of Braavos from A Song of Ice and Fire as examples of the latter.
• Orbital Bombardment: The Incoming episode "Launching Your Planetary Invasion" opens by discussing the shortcomings of relying on this as opposed to a ground invasion of an alien planet. Specifically, it compares the idea of bombarding a planet into submission to the strategic bombing campaigns of World War II, Korea, and Vietnam as well as the unused strategic nuclear arsenals of the Cold War, noting how real-life assumptions that they had rendered navies and marines obsolete were often quickly proven wrong for both military and diplomatic reasons. Instead, the video argues that orbital bombardment works best as support for ground forces, in a manner akin to artillery or tactical bombing.
• Painting the Medium: In addition to some of the examples from The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You, the video on the Hawkins National Laboratory from Stranger Things is done to resemble an old VHS tape from The '80s, much like the show it's based on.
• Proud Warrior Race Guy: "Why the 'Proud Warrior Race' is Doomed to Extinction" analyzes the characteristics of such societies and argues that they are ill-suited to modern or space-age warfare, and would likely find themselves quickly outmatched by other powers. A focus on combat prowess as the most valuable trait for its members becomes obsolete with the invention of firearms that can be easily used with just weeks of training as opposed to a lifetime, an emphasis on a Code of Honor in warfare that emphasizes battlefield glory can easily leave their armies tactically and strategically inflexible and prone to wasting soldiers and resources, a decentralized tribal structure can easily lead to terminal infighting that their rivals can exploit, and neglecting civilian or otherwise non-military components of the economy can paradoxically leave them ill-suited to industrial-era warfare that relies heavily on civilian industries and expertise. While such societies may have considerable success in more primitive ages, as technology progresses they find themselves more and more outdated. Marc opines that the only way for them to survive is to evolve into a "martial state," with a strong central government, ability to utilize new technologies as they become available, and an industrial and scientific infrastructure capable of backing up the military.
• Standard Sci-Fi Fleet: The Incoming episode "Building Your Interstellar Navy" goes into exhaustive detail on this.
• Take That!: Incoming often pokes fun at settings or plots whose worldbuilding doesn't really make sense, such as Star Citizen (here), Call Of Duty Infinite Warfare (here), and the Star Wars sequel trilogy (here, here, and here). That said, the tone is usually clinical and constructive rather than mocking.
• The Unmasqued World:
  • This video talks about how the time is right for Stargate Command to reveal itself to the public.
  • Discussed and deconstructed in "The Marvel Cinematic Universe is a Living Hell". Marc believes that the impact of the Chitauri invasion of New York on the people living in the Marvel Cinematic Universe would be comparable to the Shocking Defeat Legacy of the Franco-Prussian War on the people of France, an event that shattered humanity's sense of security and dominance and awakened it to vast threats from beyond the stars that dwarfed its scientific, military, and industrial power. When a series of subsequent alien, technological, and supernatural threats afflicts Earth in the coming years, culminating in the Snap, the impact on humanity's collective psyche would likely resemble a Cosmic Horror Story. He outright says that he'd rather live in the universe of The Boys (2019) or Warhammer 40,000, because in the former, the only truly unnatural threats come from a Super Serum with clearly-understood properties and limits on what it can do, while in the latter, everybody understands that xenos are Always Chaotic Evil and the Emperor Protects.
• Waxing Lyrical: Some videos, such as for the Lordship of Duloc and Buy n Large, quote the songs featured in their movies.
• We Have Reserves: In "Why Interstellar Armies Might Be Bigger (Or Smaller) Than You Think", Marc raises the idea that war in the future, especially interstellar warfare, might render the small, professional militaries and elite special forces of the modern world obsolete in favor of a return to the massive conscript armies of the 20th century. Specifically, he believes the rise of smaller, more highly-trained militaries to be a product of the post-Cold War "end of history" in the '90s and of The War on Terror in the '00s and '10s, when the hegemonic US-led world order could swiftly win a Curb-Stomp Battle against any force that opposed it (typically either a rogue state or a non-state terrorist/insurgent group). In a sci-fi scenario with a different geopolitical order, large standing armies and reserve forces may have more utility than a small elite force.
• Wham Line: One potential setting for the Way of Worldbuilding project, the Low Fantasy world of Tyrrell, seems like a Standard Fantasy Setting with the twist that humanity is the subject of Fantastic Racism by the "elderkin" and is constantly being abused as an inferior race by elves and dwarves. Then the intro video describes a battle in which an elven army of swordsmen and mages came to wage a quick, simple war against a tributary to bolster their emperor's prestige, only to find that their human opponents have come up with something new.
  Narrator: It was called the MG-12 recoil-operated machine gun.
• Wildlife Commentary Spoof: A non-comedic version. Their second narrator Stephen Trafford speaks with a British accent that evokes David Attenborough's nature documentaries, in a noticeable shift from Larissa Thompson's more neutral and authoritative American/Canadian accent.
• Worldbuilding:
  • The channel's overarching purpose is to explore, analyze, and critique the worldbuilding of various fictional settings.
  • Their spinoff project The Way of Worldbuilding also analyzes how to do this, complete with a discussion of the idea of "Worldbuilders' Disease", the issue of authors spending too much time on worldbuilding at the expense of plot, narrative, and characters. Marc disagrees with the idea that this is always a bad thing, citing J. R. R. Tolkien as an example of an author who focused on worldbuilding first and still created one of the greatest fantasy epics of all time, in no small part because of its extremely detailed and fleshed-out universe, as well as Tabletop RPGs and Shared Universes as examples of media where lots of worldbuilding is often necessary. On top of that, there are also art projects dedicated to nothing but worldbuilding that nonetheless have their fans. While it is possible to focus too much on worldbuilding, he believes that fretting too much about this issue can cause aspiring writers to fall into the other trap of leaving their worlds too thinly sketched to support their stories.

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