Medieval Stasis

"Oh, god of progress,
Have you degraded or forgot us?"

— Sufjan Stevens, "The World's Columbian Exposition"

So, you have a Heroic Fantasy with a long history in order to account for the fact that the Sealed Evil in a Can has been forgotten. You fast forward about five thousand years and reveal a world… exactly like the one you started in! Same kinds of tools and devices, same form of government, same language, same culture—you wouldn't even need to dress differently to fit right in.

Medieval Stasis is a situation in which, as far as the technological, cultural, and sociopolitical level are concerned, thousands of years pass as if they were minutes.

Furthermore, there have been no wars — between countries or civil wars — and no redrawing of any inter-state boundaries. No new nations have arisen, and none have been subsumed into others or wiped out. No more or less land is under the plough^note  This is one area in which things most consistently changed over time throughout the last three thousand years of Eurasian (but not so much American or Australian, prior to European settlement) history, though there have been reverses. Population kept rising with it, of course, no canals have been dug or allowed to silt up and no rivers have changed course or been made (un)navigable^note  Even today, 90% of the bulk/weight of world-trade entails shipping. Even today there is still no way to cheaply ship bulky items over long distances other than, well, shipping them. More cargo, both bulk and containers, is hauled on European big rivers annually than on European roads and railroads combined. Profit margins dwindled fast after the first 30km (one day's cart-travel) from the nearest shoreline, river, or canal, and it certainly doesn't look like people have been making and accumulating things like brick and iron in the intervening time^note  The amount of both of these in use has steadily increased over time as well. Once it's been quarried there's no reason why stone can't be used time and again, e.g. the near-complete salvaging of the stone sections of The Great Wall Of China for use in people's houses (it's had to be rebuilt a few times from scratch for just this reason). In the same vein iron was just too useful not to be well-used and looked-after and salvaged and accumulated. Knowledge and writings (scrolls, books, etc), too, have steadily accumulated over time. Most of it isn't remotely useful, of course, but it's still nice to have. Exceptions to the Rule Of Accumulation abound, such as iron-poor Japan — the islands had so little iron that it was profitable to import it from Korea and China, and every single piece of iron armour was painstakingly coated in lacquer to prevent even the slightest bit of it from being lost to rusting . There have been no demographic changes (both population increase and the subsequent inevitable decrease^note  The soil can only support so many people. All it takes is one bad harvest and a nasty cold going around, and bam. Demographic decline. Then, sooner or later, the cycle starts all over again… have caused major changes), no changes of religion or religious observance^note  Europe's Medieval period saw two — increasingly religious through the late dark ages as Pagan Europe was conquered or converted, increasingly secular until the 14th Century or so, then increasingly religious once more until the end of the 15th century reached the old high of general religiousness , no changes of dynasty unless it's a plot point, no new organizations of political or social significance (such as guilds), no changes in art or music or clothing, no new fashions, and no changes in academic or philosophical studies. Despite the apparent age of uninterrupted peace, there will still be a professional warrior caste standing — with undiminished wealth and status despite their redundancy — for the entire period. If the landscape changes at all, even in the course of 100,000 years, it won't be due to geological processes, but due to sudden and cataclysmic events. Otherwise, expect the landmarks and geography to remain identical across the eons.

A common resulting trope is the unbroken bloodline lineage that remains as straight as an arrow for millennia. In many epic fantasies (including the Ur-Example), there is a character who must claim (or reclaim) that which is their right by heritage despite the fact that it is based on an cultural relic of the past that no one in the present should even recognize, let alone care anything about. And this is in a culture where the illiterate generally outnumber the literate by a hundred fold and there is still no mass production of written records, thus very little transmittance of lore and history outside of word of mouth.

Sometimes, in fact, it seems that things were better in the past, and now the world is slowly in a vague decline.

Of course, the saying goes that necessity is the mother of invention… and the reverse is also true. If a nation is generally acknowledged to be a much more safe, secure, stable, and more pleasant place than any of its neighbors, it may feel very little incentive for radical change. China and Rome went through long periods of relative cultural stasis in this situation. The Egyptian empire lasted a good 3,000 years without changing a whole lot in most of that time. At the other end of the spectrum, a "primitive" Arcadia or Shangri-La that has everything it needs may feel no need to change things. Compared to Europe, old Polynesia could seem positively Edenic.

Sometimes justified by long-lived inhabitants (since much of real-life change is driven by generational turnover),^note It's very common for people to start craving stability more and more as they get older. If people are like that at forty, imagine what they'd be like at four hundred. being a Scavenger World, having The Powers That Be artificially restrain humanity's development, a general Creative Sterility caused by the ease and ubiquity of magic to solve problems, or other barriers to significant technological advancement, such as the presence of magical forces impeding the necessary mechanisms to build technology. If some people do manage to create a Hidden Elf Village with advanced tech, it's Decade Dissonance.

There is an Enlightenment idea that the Middle Ages were a "dark age", in which the brilliance of the Romans declined. However, this only really applies to The Dark Ages, prior to the 9th century or so, when stone buildings weren't even that common. Heck, the "castles and knights" period of Medieval Europe didn't even make it to five hundred years, and compare these◊ three castles to get some idea of how much things changed even then. See also Analysis for additional facts about the Middle Ages.

Then again, the whole 'Medieval Stasis' thing could just be the creator's attempt to avoid Totally Radical or 20 Minutes into the Future by the most readily available means, with no attempt at in-universe justification. Probably the most thoroughly lampshaded example of this would be G. K. Chesterton's The Napoleon of Notting Hill.

It should also be noted that some fans genuinely enjoy the lack of technological development and would be rather dismayed to see their beloved fantasy world suddenly discarding swords, plate and mail armor, and other such standard fantasy tropes in favor of guns and industrialization (even though the former really were around then). Not that that's likely to happen in less than centuries, so only stories that feature Flashback or Time Skip that long really need to worry about it.

The availability of magic, be it of the controllable kind or otherwise, can have a huge effect — consider the influence reliable healing magic would have on the development of medicine^note and that's not even getting into the massive cultural effects of longer lifespans, reduced infant mortality, etc. Then again, past magic might have been responsible for the current situation in the first place. Besides, your average non-magical Joe would probably be all for technology, as it would end the magic user's monopoly over things like fast travel, healing, and most importantly, blowing things to bits… assuming Superpowerful Genetics is in place and prevents Joe from learning magic himself. It also raises questions as to why if wizards are so good they are content to let non-magic-using feudal rulers run things (unless the wizards actually do run things).

And then there's the question of whether science even works the way it does in the fantasy world the way it does in our real world. Considering that the Standard Fantasy Setting typically already violates some of the fundamental laws of science (wizards who cast fireballs and lightning bolts are essentially creating energy out of nothing, which goes against the laws of thermodynamics), who's to say that steam can actually serve as a viable source of power? Do the chemicals that make up gunpowder actually react the way they do in our real world, or do they just fizzle and pop, if they even do anything at all? You might be able to use oil to Kill It with Fire, but can that oil still power an engine? If it can't, would-be inventors and innovators don't have much to work with.

On the other hand, you probably still have water, rivers that flow, land, soil, and plants and trees grown in the soil. You'll have mountains, people and objects can fall and are held to the earth by default. Humans and animals will probably bleed. Castles and other structures have been built. In short, by default, the basic laws of physics will still hold.

Finally, "stasis" does not necessarily mean "stagnant". It's quite possible for a world to continually experience intellectual, political, demographic, or other changes even if some other element of the world remains the same for centuries. A world that becomes increasingly democratic, egalitarian, and interconnected over the centuries might still have everyone wielding swords and wearing heavy armor in battles, particularly if in this world steam engines and firearms are scientifically impossible.

May feature in a Feudal Future, where there's a medieval-style social hierarchy ruled by hereditary nobility even if the technology is futuristic. Compare Modern Stasis, which is when the future doesn't look much different from the present day the show is set in, and Space Age Stasis, which is when technology doesn't seem to advance when going from The Future to the further future. A society that is perfectly aware of changes in other lands but chooses not to follow suit are probably Space Amish (assuming that they're not just, well, Amish). A related trope is Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale when the writer fails to comprehend the ramifications of the timeframe. Also compare to Muggles Do It Better, where in settings that separate the supernatural and the mundane world, the supernatural is locked in a medieval stasis while the mundane continues to advance. If parts of the world are stuck in Medieval Stasis and others have jetpacks, see Schizo Tech. Both compare and contrast Humans Advance Swiftly, which is when aliens are amazed when this trope doesn't apply to us, and contrast Punk Punk^note  Dungeon Punk, Sandal Punk and Medieval Punk specifically and Magitek, where a medieval or pre-medieval fantasy setting can be extrapolated into something much more modern, unless the new status quo becomes subject to its own equivalent of Modern Stasis in turn.

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Examples:

• Literature

Anime and Manga

• The only major innovation in the past century of Attack on Titan has been the development of the 3DMG. Everything else is firmly planted in the late end of the Dark Ages (or in the case of the Inner Walls, the Victorian/Edwardian periods). Justified. The Central Military Police have been seeking out and murdering any intellectual thinkers who pushed people to ask questions and seek answers, as well as people who tried to innovate. One unlucky couple was two steps away from inventing a working hot air balloon before the Central MP stepped in. They justify this by saying it ensures stability. In reality, it's part of King Fritz's vow (with the help of the Founding Titan's power) to prevent anyone from leaving the Walls. Outside the Walls, however, technology has advanced much more rapidly, to the point where it seems to be at around an early 20th-century level. With most nations fighting off Titans (which are actually living weapons of one specific nation) with missiles. This becomes a problem later on when they realize Paradis is woefully ill-equipped to defend itself against the more technologically advanced nations who are planning to exterminate them, and they have little hope of advancing their military technology fast enough to catch up before then.
• Due to an apocalyptic event caused by the demon known as Anslasax, the world of Bastard!! regressed back into the Medieval Age for hundreds of years. During these times, humanity practiced sorcery in order to survive from demons and other mythological creatures that somehow became reality. Later story arcs shows the heroes discovering technologies from the previous civilization, such as super computers. This revealed the true nature of Anslasax. And when the forces of Heaven and Hell got involved, they brought their own technologies with them.
• The world of Berserk has been in the Middle Ages for the last millennium or so. However, during this time span the world has seemed to have progressed through The Low Middle Ages and the High Middle Ages and is currently in a stage that seems to combine The Late Middle Ages with elements of The Renaissance and The Cavalier Years (this is more or less the time it took for real-world European cultures to progress through these stages).
• This has been divinely enforced in The Death Mage Who Doesn't Want a Fourth Time by the head god, who believed progress, especially innovations from another world, would bring more harm than good (even if the other gods didn't think the same), so for 100,000 years, the world of Lambda remained almost completely the same. The fact that Dungeons and Devil's Nests constantly spawn monsters that make it difficult to travel also didn't help things. Our protagonist decides to shake things up with his knowledge from previous lives to make the life of his followers much easier.
• In The Familiar of Zero, technology is currently the equivalent of 16-17th century Europe despite the current civilizations having stood for six thousand years with few major changes in ruling. One possible explanation is seen in the reaction of nobles to an internal combustion engine: It's a cute novelty, but they can do the same with magic and it'd be wasteful to make something like it for commoners. Besides, said engine only makes a little mechanical toy snake head move instead of trying for something more practical like a horseless carriage or a motorized crane. Additionally, as nobility is virtually synonymous with being a mage, the great majority of well-educated people (who are the ones that would normally carry out most innovation) are magic users, who would mostly have little use for most of the inventions of this time period and earlier.
• Frieren: Beyond Journey's End: Subtley Averted; while the story takes place in a Standard Japanese Fantasy Setting, flashbacks to the Long-Lived elf Frieren's youth shows it's developed a lot. When Frieren was a child, human civilization seems to have been on par with ancient Greece, with characters wearing tunics and sandals. By the time of the story a thousand years later, it's become a Medieval Fantasy Setting, with all the technological advances that implies. It's also a plot point that magical study has never stopped progressing; a magic using demon that was The Dreaded centuries ago emerges to find that modern mages are more than a match for its strongest spell.
• Kyo Kara Maoh! centers in the Great Kingdom of Shin Makoku, which is purportedly 4,000 years old, and has been ruled by the same, true-breeding twelve families the whole time, without any advancement of technology past 'horses and swords,' and an apparent decline in magic. Partially justified in that they've been being shepherded through all that history by the deific presence of their first king, who picks all their new kings and protects them, etc. Less justified in that the rest of the world has only moved forward very slightly, either. A lot of the same countries are still around from four thousand years ago, some of them still ruled by the same family who ruled them back then. Or the family that exiled that family and took over, if the previous family was an ally of our guys (the Big Bad rules a country previously ruled by Conrad's father's family, loyal human allies of Shinou). With reference to this, Conrad inserts himself into the middle of a succession dispute in Season 3, to distract the new villain who had the last one offed. On the other hand, the Mazoku, the race occupying Shin Makoku, appear to have bred to be incredibly long-lived in the four thousand years since breaking off from the rest of humanity. Apparently concentrating the magic-user genes can have really impressive effects.
• In Scrapped Princess, what at first appears to be a stock Medieval European Fantasy setting is actually the ruins of a highly advanced society possessing artificial intelligences, computer systems, and flying fortresses, not to mention Humongous Mecha. Their society was artificially sealed into the Dark Ages by an external force after the collapse of this civilization. With stability enforced by genocide of uppity populations.
• In So I'm a Spider, So What?, the world where the protagonist reincarnates has been in a medieval or similar state for several centuries. This is explained by two factors.
  • Monsters are powerful, wide-spread, and come in large numbers. As a result, humanity has been condensed into smaller, defended locations and much of the world is unknown to them. Even the seas are off-limits as dragons will attack anything that enters them.
  • As a result of the ancient civilization's disastrous war, the System was implemented. To promote personal combat, certain chemical reactions such as the burning of gunpowder is suppressed within the System.
• The underground villages of Earth in Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann have been in a state of technological stasis for a while because the village elders proclaim that leaving the villages equals death. This is justified however because of the Beastmen on the surface, whose sole purpose is to crush mankind. Further justified in that the Beastmen were devised not to evolve beyond their current state because the Anti-Spirals would detect if there were more than 1,000,000 humans on the surface of the Earth and would promptly wipe out the human population.
• Invoked by the angels themselves in That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime, where they descend in mass numbers every 500 years to destroy any nation that has advanced beyond a certain level of development, which also tends to trigger mass warfare between Demon Lords and the retaliating humans. The dwarven kingdom of Dwargo was the only known survivor of such an assault before the protagonist's nation of Tempest comes along. In fact, Tempest's frankly explosive industrial and technological growth on top of its booming economical status leaves several nations in the know about the angels worried they might trigger the angels to come down earlier, or at the very least paint a giant target on their heads. As a result, technological progress usually has to be done in secret and selfishly hoarded by most nations researching it. In fact, Rimuru gets flack from his allies when they have to spell out for him that the newest pieces of technology he's created for entertainment could easily be turned towards military applications and he basically just showed them off to the world without a care or realizing the implications. Otherworlders that aren't being summoned as weapons of warfare have actually found use providing what technological knowledge they possess to their new nations. The Eastern Empire, for example, has been using their Otherworlders' knowledge to produce working guns to better build up and supplement their military might in preparation for a war with the West. And yet, the Eastern Empire weapons merchant Damrada notes that while guns are indeed truly dangerous against humans, monsters both mundane and magical have plenty of ways of dealing with them and the sheer power of magic and skills is still the superior option in this world. The reason the angels carry this out is because they actually want to destroy the mortal world to take revenge for the death of their original master True Dragon Veldanava, but they've been restrained enough by the power of Veldanava's Ultimate Skill Justice King Michael in the hands of Emperor Rudra (who wanted to use the attacks to force humanity to come together) to limit themselves to smiting the "arrogant" mortals instead every few centuries. When Rudra ultimately dies and the Skill ends up in the hands of those who do want to destroy everything, the angels are pretty eager to carry it out with gusto even under the control.
• The world of The Twelve Kingdoms changes little from year to year, although this might have something to do with the world being run by rigid rules governing the selection of rulers and commerce and travel between the kingdoms. Additionally, many of its leaders are immortal and have been strictly charged by the heavens with achieving and maintaining a happy status quo. The lack of any fossil fuels might also be a cause. However, a number of innovations, such as Buddhism, were introduced by people from Earth Trapped in Another World. Rakushun also credits refugees from Earth with introducing paper, print, and ceramics (presumably an advanced type of ceramics, like porcelain?). They use Chinese characters and social structures. Presumably the gods ran off 12 copies of classical China for reasons of their own. Their technology might be 'stagnating' at the level of late China, no steam (but no coal) or electricity (if that even works), but good mechanisms... the fact that many kingdoms get major disasters every 50 years or so when the king dies won't help.

Card Games

• Magic: The Gathering has quite a lot of examples:
  • The City Plane of Ravnica has apparently been ruled by the exact same ten guilds for 10,000 years and counting. This is handwaved to some extent by the existence of a powerful magical pact binding them all, and some change seems to have still happened. But some of the stuffs don't quite add up (e.g., it's hard to picture the fractious slum-dwelling Gruul Clans having been the way they are now from the beginning, for one thing). Still, seeing how much happened in the same time in Real Life (i.e., basically all of recorded history, plus as much time in late prehistory), it's probably a good example of game designers having no sense of scale.
    • Of those said ten guilds, four are still ruled by the same immortal magical creatures that signed the Guildpact, two are ruled by immortal councils, one is basically the physical manifestation of hidebound bureaucracy, and the other three are more or less insane and generally poor at long-term planning.
    • With the Return to Ravnica block, the Simic actually go back to melding with magic, rather than using the more scientific-sounding cytoplasts they favored in the classical Ravnica because of an unfortunate incident involving the Guild's leader and a giant blob monster Kaiju made them virtually unsellable.
  • The Tarkir block has the first (Khans of Tarkir) and third (Dragons of Tarkir) sets form the alternative versions of the plane's present, with the second set (Fate Reforged) taking place 1,200 years in the past. The differences between Khans and Dragons are far more pronounced than the differences between either and Fate Reforged, to the point that most of the clans even dress the same. This may be a case of Gameplay and Story Segregation, as the art of cards is meant to include the mechanical colors involved, so (for example) the block's red/white/blue clan will always be dressed primarily in red, white, and blue.
  • Surprisingly for a set explicitly focused on history, averted with Dominaria. Sixty years after the apocalyptic events of Time Spiral, the plane is covered in a variety of diverse cultures that, while they share the names of their ancient counterparts, have radically altered aesthetics and values, with advancements in both technology and science. There is a strong Scavenger World component, as to be expected from a world littered with the abandoned war machines of several apocalypses, but all in all the cultures of Dominaria have only advanced since they were last seen.
  • Played with then averted with maniacal vengeance in Kamigawa. For thousands of years a status quo akin to medieval Japan has endured, but a technological breakthrough by akki goblins and soratami researchers plunged the world into full blown Cyberpunk, rendering it the most Science Fantasy of all Magic planes.
  • Somewhat justified on Zendikar; the Roil, a phenomenon of the plane that causes frequent natural disasters severe enough to reshape the land on a regular basis, prevents their from being very many large cities, and those that are would be considered small and primitive compared to other planes. This naturally means that technology doesn't get all that far either, with a lot of the plane's inhabitants living in nomadic, tribal bands.

Comic Books

• Justified in-universe in The Adventures of Barry Ween, Boy Genius. Barry travels through a dimensional wormhole to the world of Ramaat, which is locked in a medieval stasis due to "The Drain"; a natural phenomenon that causes all power to dissipate rapidly. Even ordinary fire is not possible. Being that Ramaat is a world with three suns, this actually makes sense, as it would keep the world from being cooked by solar radiation.
• In The Avengers, it turns out Odin was a member of the Prehistoric Avengers. He had created the Mjollnir at a time when the Earth was in an Ice Age and humanity was only starting to evolve. Fast forward to the 21st century, and humans have anti-gravity, energy weapons, and other weird science tech while the Asgardians are still using chamber pots and catapulting the full ones over the Asgard walls.
• In general, Asgard as it appears in The Mighty Thor tends to zigzag the trope. For the most part, they don't seem to have any technology beyond medieval (of course, with their strength, speed, and durability, why bother inventing bullets?), but sometimes they'll have actual starships and laser cannon fortifications. It seems less like Medieval Stasis and more like "all the coolest bits of history happening at once".
• Requiem Vampire Knight: progress of any kind is considered taboo and outlawed by King Dracula's edict, with any technology that finds its way into Résurrection being buried by the Archaelogists in order to prevent it from falling into the hands of those that would overthrow the current regime. The society itself relies on demonic magic, though some technology is available in form of air / spaceships. However, Dracula and the Archaeologists are the only ones allowed to use any advanced technology.
• Thieves & Kings has this without explanation — there have been (many, many) wars, mind, but one character moved from centuries in the past to join the main characters and no-one even comments on her accent.

Fan Works

• A Clash Of Neets and its associated stories, Word of God is that this tends to hold true on worlds where the Seven Goddesses are worshipped. It's not that they exactly dislike technology (Madoka was born on a world very similar to 21st century Earth, after all). It's just that they don't really see it as inherently better than magic; crops blessed by Hestia will provide as much bounty as those grown with modern farming techniques, and priests with healing magic are as effective as modern medicine, so there's no real drive to develop new technologies. The one exception is Stannis Baratheon, a Naytheist who wants to develop ways to do things without the godesses, mostly just to spite them.
• In With Strings Attached, while Ketafa is a thriving quasi-Victorian society with factories, guns, and at least one motorized vehicle, Baravada has completely stagnated, technology-wise (though they are rife with magic), and the inhabitants brush off inventions as “tinkerings.”
• In Finishing the Fight, magic is justified as the reason why society has remained somewhat stagnant. Why build a dam when you can just have a wizard divert a river for you with a spell?
• In The Fall of the Fire Empire, this is justified. While taking place in an era analogous to The Legend of Korra, technology has barely advanced from what was around in the original series. It's eventually revealed that the imprisonment of the Moon and Ocean Spirits unintentionally trapped the natural world in social and technological stasis because of the metaphysical disruption to the Balance of all things. The world can only get worse but not better until the Spirits are freed.
• In Fractured (SovereignGFC), a Mass Effect/Star Wars/Borderlands crossover and its sequel Origins, hyperdrives, turbolasers, and other tech haven't really changed over the millions of years since Star Wars Legends took place. Justified In-Universe by invoking "dark ages" in which the galaxy is nearly destroyed many times (with what happened in EU canon, this isn't as implausible as it sounds), after all, aliens did it.
• In Harry Potter and the Natural 20, Milo nearly has a Heroic BSoD when he thinks over the state of Muggles in the Potterverse and realises that magic has been keeping his own world in the medieval ages for thousands of years.
• The setting for Empath: The Luckiest Smurf, following mostly from the continuity of the cartoon show.
• Many of the deconstructive Recursive Fanfictions of The Conversion Bureau illustrate how even though Equestria and the ponies have things like magic on their side, humanity's much more advanced technology (and prowess in the ways of warfare) makes for a pretty tough Curb-Stomp Battle in itself.
  • In The Conversion Bureau: The Other Side of the Spectrum, the canon universe's Discord even calls Celestia out on how her vision of "harmony" caused pony civilization to become a stagnant Sugar Bowl and the ponies themselves becoming complacent. On the other hand, Celestia argues that Discord's idea of doing things was too chaotic to allow any pony civilization to grow at all, and that was why she took over. It goes back and forth whenever or not it actually applies or development is just really slow; it is often acknowledged that, while they are both trying to do what they think will help, it is also possible that they are both wrong and there needs to be a third option. Then we get to see human/pony runic technology in action a while later.
  • The Deconstruction Fic and satire, The Conversion Bureau: Not Alone makes the case of how the ponies' dependency on magic has made them arrogant in several ways, and completely and utterly unprepared for bullets, bombs, and missiles. And then in its sequel fic The Conversion Bureau: Conquer the Stars, the gryphons (being similar to humans in terms of history) deliver what was essentially the killing blow to Equestria in the war they declare on them, just by being much more technologically advanced.
  • In The Negotiations-verse Alternate Universe story, Fallen, Fluttershy inwardly notes that this was discussed extensively among the ponies who defected to aid the humans when comparing how humanity developed versus how Equestria developed. Many possible theories were thrown around - Lyra Heartstrings personally believed Celestia was deliberately holding Equestria back, Flash Sentry theorized that the lack of any true competitors made Equestria complacent, and Derpy Hooves hypothesized that the ponies relied too much on magic at the expense of technological growth.
• In A Man Like No Other, when some of the Avengers are taken into the future of Panem, they soon establish that computer technology has largely stagnated since the twenty-first century despite the advances in areas like genetic engineering, with the result that Tony is able to assemble a new armour with minimal effort and Natasha is able to hack the Capitol’s security system without much of a challenge.
• In The Rise of Darth Vulcan, the title character realizes that this is one of the side-effects of having essentially an immortal goddess for a ruler. Celestia and Luna hesitate to change things from what they knew from when they were foals, likely due to the Nostalgia Filter, and the desire of ponies to imitate and please Celestia takes care of the rest; showing dislike or even just boredom towards something will doom it to be ignored or even discarded. According to Flim and Flam, heavier-than-air flying machines were reinvented five times in a period of three hundred years, only to be discarded within the decade and forgotten each time.
• Defied in Avengers of the Ring sequel Dagor Arnediad; after Tony Stark spent some time in Middle-Earth, he gave the dwarves a few ideas that led to them developing the internal combustion engine, although they have focused on using these designs for construction rather than military purposes.
• The Assassination of Twilight Sparkle has the explanation that there are a lot of traditionalists that insist that things should be done magically or by hoof, even though other nations are developing their technology to the point that Equestria is falling behind. These traditionalists are part of the reason Twilight met such opposition with her reforms, though things are changing in that regard now.
  • As Pinkie's chapter reveals, this also applies to medicine, with many ponies with mental problems simply declared lost causes because there's no magical cures for their conditions or arcane treatments in the works, with many simply locked up in sanitariums. Pinkie is lucky enough to have a family that can afford to import the medicine she takes, allowing her to be herself and use her talents while maintaining her sanity, but others aren't as lucky, which is part of the reason Pinkie supported Twilight's attempts to advance Equestria's medicinal knowledge.
• Zigzagged in Sonic X: Dark Chaos due to the setting's massive Schizo Tech. Demon and Angel technology, while still making advances, has stagnated due to endless warfare between them, while Jewish and Muslim technology are deliberately held back thanks to religious fiat. Meanwhile, the Marmolims only regressed due to a near-apocalyptic Shroud infestation on their world.
  • Justified with the Shroud, since no known biological species in the universe can resist Shroud corruption. Indeed, the fact that Dark Tails is making them evolve anyway utterly terrifies both Maledict and Jesus.
• Lampshaded in Zero no Tsukaima: Saito the Onmyoji by Old Man Osmond. Both Halkagenia's technology and magic are far behind Earth's and Osmond theorizes it's because with the Church (which is highly conservative in nature) mediating between the countries, they haven't had any large scale wars in millennia. On Earth there's numerous magical factions at war with each other, leading to constant innovation. For example, what Halkagenia considers the best locking spell in the world, Saito considers remarkably simple.

Films — Animation

• The Axiom in WALL•E plays with this. As far as we are shown, all the robots and technology on the ship has remained the same, with variations being only being cosmetic differences ("Blue is the new Red!"). Justified because the people on board have everything provided for them (causing them to go extremely fat), and the ship is run by robots, who have set objectives, none we see are dedicated to R&D. Some things have changed however. We see the captains get fatter (and more cartoonish) in one scene, but they also live progressively longer (implying that medical knowledge and technology to deal with the health problems inherent to obesity have progressed, at least).

Films — Live-Action

• The Na'vi of Avatar have existed as a tribal hunter/gatherer society for longer than humanity has existed, making theirs a case of Primeval Stasis. Unlike Homo sapiens, the Na'vi have a stable population, don't suffer from diseases, and the planet itself provides them with quite advanced biotech for free, so they have no incentive to advance beyond neolithic technology. Due to these innate connections to their sentient planet and the rest of its ecosystem, they're arguably extensions of Pandora rather a real "alien race".
• Blood of the Tribades: The village of Bathory, which is entirely vampires, remain living in a medieval-like society. One of the female exiles complains of this, saying they refused to change and bring in new things. It seems to be one reason some of them were exiled, as they wanted such change.
• Kryptonian technology in Man of Steel. A 20,000-year-old ship buried deep beneath the ice in Canada is able to recognize and upload Krypton's own version of a flash drive that was only created 33 years ago. That certainly shows that they haven't upgraded since then, but it's also revealed that Kryptonians had flourished and prospered for hundreds of thousands of years already anyway. That Kryptonian society was largely static for hundreds of thousands of years was pretty much explained straight up in the Infodump from Jor-El's avatar.
• Planet of the Apes had ape society. Though some apes are seen using basic guns, their technology is mostly medieval. This is true in the TV series set in 3085, the first movie set in 3978, and the last movie (of the original continuity) set in the early 21st century with some scenes in 2670. Even clothing styles stay the same. This is complicated by the fact that the place of the TV series in the film continuity (if at all) isn't confirmed and the fact that it's uncertain whether the movies are in a closed time loop (so whether the society in the early 21st century becomes the one in 3978). The animated series did actually show ape society with 20th-century technology.
• The Predators' technology is never seen to advance regardless of whether they're hunting pirates during the Age of Sail, gangbangers in modern-day LA, or marines and xenomorphs in the future. The Expanded Universe offers a number of explanations: one is that the yautja's tech is stolen from an older race that attempted to occupy their planet, so they can replicate and adapt it, but lack the understanding of its base principles to improve on it. Another is that the Predators' society revolves completely around the hunt, and they've lost all interest in intellectual pursuits. A related theory is that their current set of hunting equipment is deemed "sporting" and will be used regardless of further advances, much like how humans still hunt deer with firearms or bows rather than smart bombs or armed drones. The latter is suggested in the comic Aliens vs. Predator: War, where a team of yautja assaulting a hive on a xenomorph-dominated world to capture its queen leave the spears and discs behind and take plasma rifles and grenades.
• The Asgardians from Thor: The Dark World are an interesting case. They are a society caught in medieval stasis that is advanced far beyond medieval times. They are shown using the same weapons (swords, shields, and spears), technology, and armor 5,000+ years ago as they do in modern times. Horses are a common form of transportation. Yet they can harvest material from stars, have flying machines, and travel between worlds through wormholes. Implied to be a combination of their extremely long lives, emphasis on close combat, use of magic, and being at the top of the food chain so long and eliminated all of society's ills that they have no reason to change. It's also intentionally vague how much of this is just aesthetics; their spaceships are made to look like longships while their armor and shields incorporate force fields. More advanced technology that kept with the theme would be visually indistinguishable.

Gamebooks

• The Lone Wolf series of gamebooks is set on the planet Magnamund, which was declared by Word of God to be in stasis. This was actually retroactively enforced after another writer created a series of straight novels telling the story of the gamebooks and ended one of them with a Distant Finale set in a modern future.

Live-Action TV

• Subverted in Babylon 5. At first it might seem highly questionable that the Centauri and Minbari, who have been starfaring peoples for millennia, are not substantially more advanced than humanity, which has only been capable of interstellar travel for barely a century. Eventually, however, it was revealed that the reason for this was simply that Earth has reverse-engineered all of its advanced technology from alien devices they discovered abandoned or stole or bought from various sources (including the Centauri themselves), with the Centauri still having withheld certain particular valuable advances (such as Artificial Gravity) in an attempt to retain their advantage. Nor does technological development slow after the show begins, either: by the end of the series, a Lensman Arms Race has begun using the leavings of the now-departed Vorlons and Shadows.
• Firefly: A very low-key and unnoticeable at first glance version is present on the decidedly-Space Western border planets, which background material describes as intentional on the part of the Core planets to keep them backward and controlled. There's even intentional technological stasis where the villain of the episode has the money to build a real city but keeps it at a wild-west level so he can 'play cowboy' and be the one with the best toys.
• Game of Thrones: Westerosi technology has not improved significantly over at least the last thousand years. In fact, ancient marvels of engineering such as the Wall are implied to be built on Lost Technology, and no one has been able to figure out how to make more Valyrian steel (though experts can rework it).
  • Zig-zagged with the geopolitical side of things. House Stark has ruled The North for eight thousand years (by contrast the longest continuous dynasty in real life - 'House Yamato' of Japan - has only been around for a quarter of that time) and Houses Arryn and Lannister have ruled their kingdoms for about six millennia. On the other hand, empires have risen and fallen in Essos during that same period, and other Westerosi Houses such as Tyrell and Baratheon are relatively new. The map of Westeros as a whole has also shifted over the centuries prior to the show.
  • In House of the Dragon, the looks, technology and knowledge are not much different from Game of Thrones, which is set 200 years later. If anything, they're actually slightly more advanced, with costumes and props looking like Tudor designs from the 1500s, instead of how Game of Thrones was inspired by the Wars of the Roses from the 1400s. The showrunners state in behind the scenes videos that they did this to reflect how it starts at the end of the Targaryen golden age, and their society never reached this level of peace and prosperity again.
• Legend of the Seeker: In "Revenant", a seeker, Confessor and wizard a thousand years earlier have the same kinds of clothes, with apparently no change in the intervening time.
• Justified in Once Upon a Time, though the reason why doesn't become clear until Season 4, when the show decides to explain how The Multiverse works. Basically, aside from the Real World (referred to as "The Land Without Magic" In-Universe), all other worlds seen are "Realms of Story," whose events have been recorded by magically-empowered writers known as Authors. Some worlds include the Enchanted Forest (where a majority of the cast hails from), Wonderland, and Oz, which are typical fantasy worlds. However, the show later reveals realms such as The Land Without Color (where Doctor Frankenstein, and presumably all old horror characters, are from), Victorian London (home of Alice), and a Roaring Twenties London (the home of Cruella De Vil). The latter three are explicitly Theme Park Versions of the respective locations/time periods they correspond to, and while time flows naturally, they are stuck in the era they are based on. However, the civilians of those worlds presumably don't realize this; Cruella, when asked by the current Author what year it is in her world, is unable to give a straight answer, having never actually thought about it before.
• In the Australian-Polish series Spellbinder, the Spellbinders have remnants of advanced technology in the forms of powersuits and walkie-talkie like stones. While they themselves have little understanding of how these things work, they nonetheless imprison any non-spellbinder who creates any new invention or innovation as they fear that technological progress will end up leading the commoners to overthrowing if they don't nip it in the bud.
• Stargate:
  • Stargate SG-1:
    • The Goa'uld are shown in ancient Egypt sequences as using the same technology as they do in the regular episodes. In the time that humans went from simple bows to nuclear missiles, the Goa'uld haven't added trigger guards to their guns. This is justified by Goa'uld culture being antithetical to good scientific practice (although Goa'uld scientists like Nirrti and Nerus do exist), and all their technology being stolen anyway, but to be this extreme, they need to be quite the Planet of Hats. It's shown a few times that some isolated worlds, free from Goa'uld control, had actually advanced further technologically than humans on Earth. Notably the Tollan (humans transplanted from Earth with whatever level of technology they had at the time), had developed some technology that was more advanced than the Goa'uld.
    • The Goa'uld also enforce this on their subjects, ensuring they don't develop anything more advanced than bronze age tool, meaning their subjects are easily cowed by any display of force by the Goa'uld flashy weapondry.
    • The advanced human race Aschen reduce the fertility of less advanced races under the pretense of bringing medical technology. The Aschen then create farmworlds on top of other races' civilization, keeping the descendants of the original inhabitants as uneducated farmhands.
  • Stargate Atlantis:
    • The Wraith systematically destroy any society advanced enough to pose a threat to them, meaning the most likely type of society will be of medieval level, or lower. This has the disadvantage of lower cullings on each planet each time they revisit since a lower technology level means higher child mortality as well as lower populations as people don't live long enough and the population doesn't reach too high. The Wraith Queen in the pilot is even surprised that Earth's population is in "the billions". Subverting this are the Genii, who pretend to be at an agrarian level of development, but it's all just a ruse to keep the Wraith away from their secret underground facilities, which are about somewhere between the 1940s and the 1960s, and the Travelers, Space Nomads whose Used Future technology and spaceships are still advanced enough to take on Vanir^note Asgard Lost Tribe in Pegasus, who are admittedly are somewhat less advanced technologically than their Ida counterpart, at least when it comes to weaponry spaceships and win.
    • An interesting variation occurs with the Asuran Replicators, who emulate the Ancients that created them by purposely keeping their technology at the same level as the Ancients, despite over 10,000 years passing in the meantime.
• Star Trek:
  • Star Trek: The Original Series:
    • In the episode "Errand of Mercy", Spock mistakenly concluded that because the Organians live with medieval technology and have absolutely no interest in helping to develop from The Federation or the Klingons they were subject to this trope. Subverted in that the Organians are actually advanced Energy Beings who simply have no need for technology anymore and the town was just a front so they could interact with physical beings.
    • Episodes like "The Return of the Archons" and "The Apple" have this enforced on the native populations by the technology of earlier, more advanced generations.
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation:
    • In the episode "Up the Long Ladder", the Enterprise rescues a group of Space Amish who have lived as they have for 200 years, even keeping their Irish accents. In the same episode, they come across the other, technological, group from the same original colonists of whom only five survived landing and they have been breeding through advanced cloning for 200 years — but evidently keeping their stasis so as not to develop space travel to go back and get more humans for their genetic pool.
    • The episode "The Masterpiece Society" has the Enterprise run into another lost colony of humanity, who have not advanced a lot since they landed on the planet. It's discussed and justified, as the people have been using genetics to make themselves nearly perfect, and the city that have is a sort of Utopia. They don't have many problems or communications with the galaxy at large, so they don't have much of a reason to seek new technologies.
  • The Bajorans from Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine have culture going back over half a million years, but whose first space travel was roughly 800 years before The Next Generation era, and were surpassed by the Cardassians who conquered them. Their society has been directed by their (accurate) faith in the race known as the Prophets for much or all of that time, so it is probably deliberate. In the Millennium trilogy of books, the character Arla Rees (a Bajoran), shares the general Starfleet belief that the Prophets are Sufficiently Advanced Aliens, and rages against them for retarding Bajor's progress. She calls the Orbs (artifacts dropped on Bajor by the Prophets) the worst thing that ever happened to Bajor.
  • The Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "The Quickening" features an alien race that's been deliberately stuck in a pre-industrial state thanks to a disease that accelerates in the presence of EM fields.

Music

• Gloryhammer: Inverted, progress has been very fast. In the thousand years that pass between Legends from the Kingdom of Fife and Space 1992, Fife has gone from a medieval-esque fantasy kingdom ravaged by war to an intergalactic empire.

Podcasts

• The Cool Kids Table Harry Potter-themed game Hogwarts: The New Class shows that the wizarding world is still deep in this, to the point where not even McGonagall knows what pens or phones are.
• The Twilight Histories episode “City of Pyramids” takes place in an Egypt that hasn’t advanced much since the Bronze Age. From the same episode, we learn that most universes explored by the Twilight Histories corporation haven’t advanced beyond the hunter-gatherer stage.

Tabletop Games

• The main premise of Age Of Ambition is averting this. It's fantasy setting is going through its version of the Renaissance with much focus being on how the medieval societies are changing from the influence of new technologies like gunpowder and the printing press; and new ideas like representative government.
• BattleTech: Mostly subverted.
  • While two devastating interstellar wars lead to technology for BattleMechs, spaceships and other equipment remaining stagnant or declining — a factory-fresh BattleMech built in 2750 is vastly superior to its jury-rigged 3025 counterpart — this situation only endures for two and a half centuries (about the same length of stagnation for 'Dark Age' Europe). Also ComStar still hoards the advanced LosTech and plans to rebuild society with it once the Great Houses have destroyed each other. By 3039, the Great Houses have began to rediscover and rebuild formerly lost technology in small quantities, and by the time of the FedCom Civil War (3062-3067) and Word of Blake Jihad (3068-3080), the Inner Sphere powers have rediscovered and even improved upon Star League technology, or invented entirely new equipment.
  • Also subverted with the political and historical side of the setting. Unlike Star Wars, Dune, or Warhammer 40,000, history does not remain static — several factions rise and fall over the 1100-odd years of BattleTech'' history, with the longest-lived only 7-8 centuries old and all of them changed from their original incarnations.
• Dungeons & Dragons: Practically each and every game world falls under this to some degree or another, perhaps with the exceptions of the bizarre Planescape setting, and Eberron, which features a Pulp Adventure setting influenced by Indiana Jones movies, mixed with Dungeon Punk, in a faux-19th century world heavily influenced by Sufficiently Analyzed Magic and Magitek.
  • The Forgotten Realms setting generally falls under this, with a few exceptions. Countries come and go, several fallen kingdoms/empires may have been built on the same spot, and politics has dramatically changed. To the extent there's enough ancient-to-modern history to have a splatbook (Lost Empires of Faerun) devoted to it. And while swords-and-bow technology hasn't changed all that much, humans have advanced out of the Bronze Age and into the Iron Age, new spells and fighting styles are constantly being developed, and one church (Gond) has the invention and development of technology as one of its primary goals, thus leading to things like the printing press and the alchemical equivalent of gunpowder.
    • The gnomes tend to avert this. Heck, the only reason that gnomish inventions aren't more widespread (and more willingly accepted) is that the gods are ''deliberately'' meddling to keep things in stasis. The only reason the gnomes have accomplished as much as they have is that they are very innovative: every single thing that the gods warp to try to discourage them from playing around with technology is repurposed to do something that fits with the warping.
    • Netheril, one of the lost empires, had medieval technology over a thousand years before the 'present'. This was justified by the Netherese reliance on magic, which was both more readily available, and more powerful than it is now. Also wizards really did run this empire.
    • The lack of technological progress and continuous state of warfare are justified within the setting by the legend of the Sea of Fallen Stars' creation, which supposes that the gods made it so that the peoples of the world would never become too curious or cooperate too much, as punishment for the titans' hubris.
  • Justified in the Hollow World, where the Spell of Preservation acts to inhibit cultural and technological change, thus maintaining what amounts to a planet-sized anthropological museum. Elsewhere in Mystara, technical and social progress is much faster in some regions (Darokin, the Savage Coast) than others.
  • Partially averted in Ravenloft, where the northwestern Core has undergone significant (Clockpunk-level) technical and scientific progress in recent decades. The fact that most domains in the Land of Mists are less than 200 years old also helps spare it from accusations of medieval Stasis; Barovia is over twice that old but is openly derided as an archaic backwater by its neighbors. However, the Dark Powers do interfere to maintain some cultural stasis, often by mucking about with people's minds, especially those of the darklords. For example, the proximity of Falkovnia (solidly Medieval) to other domains with Renaissance-era technology does nothing to change its culture, largely because the resident darklord is averse to both magic and technology.
  • Subverted in Dragonlance by the tinker gnomes. Societies have come and gone, especially with The Cataclysm wiping out the most advanced empire on the planet and sending the rest into a downward spiral. But through it all, the tinker gnomes continue to plug away at their inventions (doomed by the gods to fail, however). Despite their handicap, gnome ships sail the seas and rivers powered by steam (occasionally exploding); labor-saving devices process wheat (usually exploding); and other gnomish inventions milk cows, shear sheep, walk dogs, groom horses, and collect eggs (at the same time. While exploding. If you're lucky). The tinker gnomes' inventions are actually the cause of a lot of the stasis of the continent of Ansalon. Other races are so put off by the crazy and sometimes dangerous outcomes of the gnomes' technology that they don't have much interest in developing technology themselves.
    • One short story features an insanely evil tinker gnome whose latest invention, while complete, is still theoretical. His loving if sociopathic description of how it works place it squarely in the category of an atomic bomb.
    • An extremely tongue-in-cheek article in a Dragonlance Splatbook describes one gnome's theory on constructing a giant span of strings sprawling across the continent, connecting every town and place of interest. Since the strings resemble an interconnected rope net, he calls it The Internet. And given it's appearance to a spider's web, he suggests calling it The 'Web for short.
    • Subverted by the continent of Taladas, whose gnomes are actually competent and are known as engineers rather than tinkers. Their inventions work much better, and so Taladas is more technologically advanced than Anaslon. In one of the more recent editions, Ansalon's gnomes were also freed from the "curse of the tinker" and are now considered engineers on the same level as their Taladas counterparts, so Ansalon may soon start to emerge from the stasis.
  • Justified in Greyhawk; between the fractured state of its politics, the divinely-mandated lack of traditional gunpowder, and the fairly small timescale of the majority of its events. The paladins of Murlynd, the hero-deity of Magitek and advancement for good purposes, dedicate themselves to averting this trope, and even use guns. One Dragon Magazine article also detailed a future version of the setting where this trope is averted; after a dwarven reunification leading to an explosion in technology and 1400 years of progress, Oerth ends up with a level of advancement more or less on par with the modern day, plus magic.
  • A sourcebook on the drow explains why the dark elves' technology hasn't progressed much, even though, because drow are naturally resistant to magic and highly ambitious, they embrace technology nearly as much as humans do. Because drow society is characterized by ruthless scheming and infighting, drow inventors are extremely reluctant to share their discoveries or write things down. As a result, clockwork devices, printing, gunpowder, and even simple steam engines have all been alternately invented and forgotten by drow over the generations.
• In Eon, magic is the stand-in for physics, making mages the stand-in for scientists, and the study of magical fields and their effects on the world around them the stand-in for researching and inventing new ways to harness electricity and advancing technology, giving this trope a rather reasonable implementation. That said, and in keeping with Eon's rule of thumb to provide subversions to every trope it plays with, the dwarves' general distrust for magic has lead them to advance technologically and has allowed them to invent things like semi-automatic, pump-action crossbows.
• Exalted has an interesting take on this, based on the setting's conception for how technology works. It typically requires supernatural powers to develop and build anything more advanced than 16th-century technology, and how easily this is done depends on the people in question. The Solars had the best powers, and governed an age of technology at least as advanced as what we have now, and frequently greater. The Dragon-Blood ruled Shogunate didn't have the means to maintain the Solar infrastructure practically anywhere at all, and was slowly falling apart due to infighting, invasions of reality, and simple entropy. The Realm (also run by Dragon-Blooded) maintained a social and technological level roughly equivalent to medieval Japan (with the occasional remnant of previous ages) for about 800 years, but that was due to deliberately enforced restrictions. Development in the rest of Creation at during that period varies, depending on factors like security from raksha or Underworld attacks, Realm influence, and available resources and Essence-users.
• Fading Suns:
  • The church blames technology for the fall of the Second Republic, so the Engineer's Guild has mostly focused on maintaining or at most duplicating old technology. What little research they do has to be done in secret.
  • The Vau are even worse than humanity; they have not advanced at all since the Second Republic first made contact two thousand years ago due to having an (even more) rigid caste system that prizes stability over all else. Though they were largely more advanced than even the Republic at its height.
• GURPS Banestorm's world of Yrth has been kept at a Late Medieval level of technology and society, in part due to the Megalan Empire's Ministry of Serendipity, a secret police charged with hunting down inventors, technologies, and other ideas which threaten the status quo. The other nations of Yrth appear to have similar organizations. In all cases, this is because mages worldwide are in favor of maintaining stasis to protect their position.
• Iron Kingdoms deconstructs this (with the possible exception of the elves). A few centuries ago the IK were invaded by a nation with more powerful wizards, so to retake their home they had to develop new technology powered by magic. To make it even more shocking, it isn't just the humans that have advanced. At some point they noticed that certain bands of goblins, trolls, and ogres seemed smarter than others, and these sub-species were incorporated into the societies (gobbers are the most advanced, and make excellent mechanics). Later, it turns out that the Elves (the ones form Ios anyway) are even more technology advanced than the other races as they have laser guns (or guns that fire magic laser beams) and force fields.
• Averted in Ironclaw, even the oldest of the Great Houses are less than a thousand years old, the youngest two centuries, and they all have detailed histories that are anything but static. In the past hundred years in particular the gun and printing press were developed, and the High King surrendered direct control of the capital city to a council of merchant guilds.
• Enforced by Rokugan's ruling samurai caste in Legend of the Five Rings. Technology and magic are both very stringently regulated, with a strong cultural emphasis on the "Celestial Order" (parallels with the Tokugawa Shogunate are completely intentional).
• The far future world of Numenera features many weird locations throughout its universe. One such setting is the Gloaming, a solar-system-sized disc with a star in the center, inhabited by millions of worlds worth of creatures within a (relatively) narrow band of the disc. Countless intelligent species and societies living within the disc, no matter their apparently capability, have managed to remain in a low-tech, medieval society for apparently thousands of years. This is in part due to the influence of psychically empowered aliens, who wish to feed on the inhabitants and find a low-tech, culturally simple world much easier to control.
• Pathfinder: The main setting — the Inner Sea region — has maintained more or less the same national borders, ethnic groups, languages, and culture in the four millennia and seven centuries since the beginning of the in-setting calendar. The god Cayden Cailean, who ascended a solid two millennia before the setting's present, is still a near-perfect embodiment of modern adventurers and pub regulars. The kingdom of Taldor, which has existed as a unified nation for five millennia and counting, maintains the same government structure and internal divisions that it did when it was founded. For reference, five millennia is roughly the time that passed between the founding of the Indus Valley civilization, the first city-building culture known to have existed, and the modern day.
  • One notable exception is Alkenstar, a duchy where magic does not work anymore. They have rifled guns, experimental revolvers, and a gun factory. Taldor also uses cannons for artillery, and most of the nations seem to be at a more Renaissance level. Most countries have printing presses. However, most tech is expensive as hell.
  • To some degree this trope is justified by the setting's history; it seems every few thousand years some sort of catastrophe causes empires to crumble and progress to revert to more primitive times. The big one was Earthfall when the Starstone fell from the sky causing massive cataclysms and destroying the mighty empires of Azlant and Thassilon. A more minor one happened just a hundred years before the setting opens; Aroden, the god of humanity, was supposed to return and usher in a golden age. Instead he died (somehow), and this causes a massive rift to the Abyss called the Worldwound to open, an endless hurricane several hundred miles wide to form, and weeks of storms and earthquakes.
  • We learn it is completely averted as of Starfinder. In brief, the core setting of Golarion advanced to spaceflight using magic, technology, and Magitek at the same time. The inhabitants view magic and comic-book level science as entirely complimentary, as both are just ways to get things done. Then history blipped, Golarion disappeared, but its people are still around as are all of the other worlds in Golarion's star system. The gods, when asked, just say, "It's fine. Don't ask more questions." Its inhabitants are now an interstellar compact of worlds who still use both magic and technology with no prejudice toward either. Your computer may be a piece of magical hypertechnology, or a technological piece of magic.
• Rocket Age: Traditional Martian society strictly regulates the maintenance and modification of technology, as most of what the Martians use was originally made by the Ancients, giving it both religious importance and a need to preserve what could otherwise end up being Lost Technology. This is slowly changing as Earthlings have arrived on the red planet, although the principality of Kirtal has begun improving, repairing, and advancing on their own.
• Traveller: The Vilani First Imperium was quite stagnant, leading to their defeat at the hands of the Terran Federation.
• Inverted in Pendragon, which starts off in post-Roman Britain until King Arthur takes the throne, then each phase of his reign parallels a period in the history of England from the Norman Conquest to the Wars of the Roses with technology to match.
• Warhammer both plays this trope straight and averts it, depending on the Fantasy Counterpart Culture or fantasy race in question:
  • The Empire (a Fantasy Counterpart Culture of the Holy Roman Empire) plays this entirely straight in some contexts and averts it in others. Broadly speaking, it has been in cultural, linguistic, and political stasis for millennia, but has seen more rapid technological and scientific developement in the setting's recent history:
    • The Empire has a 2,500 year old history as a coherent political entity. By way of an example, that's the equivalent of something like Alexander the Great's Empire surviving into the modern day still controlling Greece, Turkey the Levant, Egypt and Iran and still referred to as 'Alexander's Empire'. During this time it has evolved from barbarian tribes through medieval feudalism, and by the game's present day is essentially early modern Europe, roughly the era The Protestant Reformation, still keeping its same religion, most of its geographic borders and the same government (if not ruling dynasty, the first Emperor Sigmar had no descendants and set up an elective monarchy before disappearing and coming to be worshipped as a god, and nobles both electoral and lesser saw a lot of dynasty changes on specific titles). The closest that the Empire came to falling apart was the Age of Three Emperors (starting with Two Emperors and at some point having four before one of two of the claims were reunified), but the Great War Against Chaos and its hero, Magnus the Pious, reinforced unity about two hundred years before the default present day of the setting in 2522.
    • Within the 200 years since Magnus, however, the Empire has seen a lot of rapid developements. The Colleges of Magic were established by him — the Empire had no formal or not-outlawed magical traditions in the 2,300 years previously; all of its modern magical knowledge and practice was derived then or later. Its technology is also in active developement. The city of Nuln in particular is home to an active School of Engineers, which makes a point of constantly trying to improve on its designs (and is somewhat infamous for the unreliability of its newest stuff). As a whole, firearms are widespread, as are more experimental and dangerous black powder weapons like volley guns and rocket launchers, and even cantankerous Steam Tanks. Larger cities like Altdorf and Nuln boasts indoor plumbing and drawbridges; Nuln is so shrouded in smog from its many factories that it could be mistaken for Victorian London. The printing press is in wide use, while the free city of Marienburg is experimenting with a stock market and democracy. Experimental designs, ranging from a few decades to a few years old by the default present, include clockwork horses, early sniper rifles, and lumbering "land ships". The minor states of Estalia and Tilea (fantasy Italy) are more or less on par with those of the richer southern parts of the Empire.
  • The other main human faction, Bretonnia ("France") has an in-universe 900 year old history, during which it has stayed a feudal monarchy ruled by a king. It was originally portrayed as on a similar technological level to the Empire, but with a social situation more akin to the 18th century with powdered and bewigged nobles mincing about effetely and ignoring the plight of the massed poor. Subsequent editions have actually regressed Bretonnian technology to a High Middle Ages level and given them a more "heroic" slant, with a culture of bold knights and doughty peasants straight out of Malory's La Morte d'Arthur despite sharing borders with the much more advanced Empire and Tilea for its entire history. It has been implied that this is due, at least in part, to manipulation by the immortal rulers of the Asrai (Wood Elves). For game balance, their most elite troops apparently have blessings from their goddess to give bullets a 50% chance to magically miss (though this doesn't always save them, as Kurt Helborg's massacre of a Bretonnian army with cannon fire in "Duty and Honour" can attest to). In-universe they get away with their stasis mostly because of geography — the Empire, Kislev, Estalia, Tilea, and Karaz Ankor each border at least one homeland of a major villainous faction: the Badlands/Dark Lands (Greenskins), Norsca/the Chaos Wastes (Chaos), Sylvania (Vampire Counts), the Drakwald (independent Beastmen), and Skavenblight (Skaven). Bretonnia does fight all those same foes, but since it's far from their homes it does so in far reduced numbers due to distance, and the threats originating inside Bretonnian borders (e.g. Masif Orcal, the Beastmen inhabiting the forests of Arden and Chalons, the undead at Mousillon) are simply of a much smaller scale than the other major factions deal with. Their own land borders are taken up by ostensibly allied elven, human, and dwarf kingdoms (occasional skirmishes with the Empire notwithstanding), while the ocean to their west is in turn dominated by the friendly High Elves. And when Bretonnia does send out expeditionary forces to help said allies, they tend to consist mostly of knights (heavy lancers still being a relevant though not cost-effective combat force well past the era the Empire is aping) supplemented by magic elites, or else are from their navy (which, due to Loophole Abuse, makes use of gunpowder weapons unlike their land forces). Magic is also more common among their troops than other human nations in the form of enchanted knight gear, but most of said magic is very subtle and its effects aren't that significant.^note For example, the Bretonnia 6e army book has a list of "Common" magical equipment they use, the most expensive of which are the Sword of Striking, Sword of Might, Sword of Battle, and War Banner, which give +1 to To Hit, Strength, Attack, and Leadership respectively for the units equipping them. For reference, a unit gets +2 to Strength over the human baseline (said baseline representing the damage an average soldier can inflict with a basic one-handed melee weapon) just from being equipped with a two-handed weapon like a greatsword or halberd, and a +1 difference in Leadership (representing a unit's morale/bravery) is less than the difference between a well-trained soldier (e.g. Imperial State Troops at Leadership 7) and a badly-trained one (e.g. Bretonnian fuedal levies all at Leadership 5), or between an average and an elite (which are either 8 or 9). Ditto for the Attack difference, representing the number of times a unit attacks per round (e.g. an average State Troop at Attack 1 vs a State Troop Sergeant at Attack 2). Very subtle indeed.
  • The world's minor human powers are more or less static. Kislev, as a mash-up of Tsarist Russia with a hint of medieval Poland, is backwards compared to its western neighbors. The humans on the rain-drenched island of Albion are still a bunch of druids and priestesses prancing naked around the maypole. And from what little is known about them, the Eastern Empire of Cathay developed iron armor and gunpowder weapons before Nagash was born in the local bronze age... and 3000 years later, still at the exact same societal and tech level (this being the equivalent of the Shang dynasty surviving to today, controlling all of China and maintaining similar technology and society for that entire time).
  • All the variants of elves are similarly stuck in stasis. The three kinds of elves — High, Wood and Dark — split apart during The Sundering and the War of Vengeance, roughly 4,500 year ago. Nearly five millennia later, the Wood Elves are isolationist semi-barbarians, the High Elves refuse to industrialize for aesthetic reasons, and the Dark Elves arrogantly insist that their Automatic Crossbows, both hand-held and siege engine-sized, are just as good as gunpowder weapons despite their game stats telling very different stories. Interestingly, High Elven magic has given them a standard of living handily outdoing that of every other culture (the two big reasons being that they're naturally healthy/disease-resistant and that their mages can cast botanical spells that render large-scaling farming more or less unnecessary), but their military remains mostly composed of guys with spears and bows. Elven culture as a rule Does Not Like Guns, despite how demonstrably effective they are (mages and magical beasts can compensate for this disadvantage in naval combat, less so in ground combat).
  • The Dwarfs are a mixed bag. They were the first culture to invent gunpowder, and have been writing grudges about clans not returning another's steam engines in good repair for centuries. One coastal Hold has constructed ironclad steamboats and simple submarines, and the dwarfs can even field primitive steam-powered aircraft, gyrocopters, and, in the Gotrek & Felix stories, a zeppelin capable of traversing the Chaos Wastes. The dwarfs have two major obstacles, though: first, their old empire was fractured roughly 4,000 years ago, and their constant warring with Greenskins and Skaven for the last 4 milennia means that they're more focused on producing and improving their old weapons than inventing new ones. Second, dwarfs are intensely conservative and distrustful of any technology that hasn't proven its worth over a couple of centuries. As a result, many young dwarf engineers with new ideas end up running off to join the Empire's engineering schools, adding brain drain to the dwarf's troubles. While Dwarf armies do make use of muskets and cannons, as well as advanced gear like flamethrowers and repeaters in more limited numbers, the bulk of their troops still consist of dwarfs in steel mail equipped with axes, mattocks, hammers, and crossbows. They even still use ballistae and catapults that are literally thousands of years old.
  • The Skaven avert this trope and continue to advance with the help of their Mad Science — some of their more recent innovations include trains, long-range communication devices, and gatling guns (many of which have puntastic names). Their technology generally sacrifices safety for results though and is prone to exploding and other malfunctions.
  • The Tomb Kings are a justified, and more literal example, as they are all the undead remnants of the Bronze Age civilization, and are thus essentially incapable (or possibly simply unwilling) of advancing their technology.
  • There's an interesting case with the Lizardmen — they're the oldest inhabitants of the Warhammer world, and have some of the most powerful magical relics in the setting, but apparently haven't invented the wheel yet, something even the Orcs have gotten around to. Their Slann rulers are slow to react and even more conservative than dwarfs, due to reluctance over doing anything that might disrupt the Great Plan of the Old Ones. And when some Lizardmen tried to colonise a new area and got cut off from their froggy leaders, they regressed even further, to a society with less magic and overall co-ordination, with some completely isolated islanders devolving into mere beasts. This seems to suggest that not only are the Lizardmen locked in Medieval Stasis but that it's only due to the Slann that they're not going backwards.
• The Warhammer 40,000 game setting is another sci-fi example of this trope:
  • The Imperium of Man has been in a state of cultural stagnation and slow technological decline for ten thousand years following a series of disasters that dragged humankind from the height of its power. The first pangalactic human civilization collapsed due to the Men of Iron revolt and Warp Storms preventing interstellar travel, leading to the five thousand year Age of Strife. Then, just when the God-Emperor reunified humanity and started its road to recovery, the Horus Heresy civil war ended any hope of that, leaving a functional but stagnant Imperium in the aftermath.
  • On top of civil wars and periods of division, the Imperium is plagued by a hideously inefficient central bureaucracy and administrative infighting. The Adeptus Mechanicus have a monopoly on technology, wrap routine maintenance in superstition and religious ritual, and are more concerned with rediscovering the technology of humanity's lost golden age than trying to innovate. Some Imperial worlds have regressed to pre-black powder or even Stone Age technology levels, and when rediscovered by the rest of humanity may be left in that state because the natives make for natural warriors.
  • The Eldar were crippled literally overnight by the Fall of their galaxy-spanning empire (which incidentally ended the aforementioned Warp Storms across the galaxy) so that now even their own history is passed down in the form of esoteric myths and legends, and their limited resources are focused on preserving the technology they have rather than advancing. The Craftworld Eldar are focused on the Path, a philosophy and lifestyle intended to prevent them from falling into dangerous decadence (by dangerous we mean soul sucked out and eternally digested by Chaos God/dess Slaanesh, spawned from the millions of years of hedonism by the psychically powerful Eldar Empire), and as such are culturally static. The Exodites have similarly embraced a comparatively primitive existence on the galactic frontier. And the Dark Eldar have no intention of giving up the same hedonism and vices that led to the Fall, only in staving off the consequences for it by sacrificing others and eating their pain.
  • The Orks are much more dynamic. Their society is too chaotic and violent to let them develop very far in most cases, but they have basic technological knowledge hard-coded into their very genes, and are unconsciously psychic, allowing their more insane gadgets to function because they think it should. They've also come up with devices such as "deff koptas" and "Gargants" (helicopters and Humongous Mecha) within the Imperium's lifetime, have managed to invent crude tractor beams and mass teleporters that are more effective (and more dangerous) than any other race's equivalents, and in the era of the Beast managed to briefly surpass Imperial technology. Of course, Orks aren't driven by scientific inquiry or a desire for a better life, but the need for More Dakka and more killy war machines, so culturally and politically they're perpetual barbarians.
  • The Necrontyr turned themselves into the Necrons, mindless automatons serving star-sized soul-eating monsters known as the C'Tan (who were the ones actually responsible for the species wide Unwilling Robotization) before betraying said Star Gods and going into stasis after the War in Heaven. On the other hand, they are so far ahead of everyone else already that it hardly matters. The armies used on the tabletop are scouts and raiding parties; their full-powered war machines aren't even reactivated yet. Incidentally, the Eldar and Orks are Living Weapon species made to fight the Necrons and the C'Tan by the Old Ones during the aforementioned War in Heaven. The Orks were originally the Krorks, too bad the Old Ones forgot to install an "off switch" before going extinct. The Eldar became stagnant after having been spoon fed everything and slowly declined for 60 million years before the Fall.
  • For beings that include the incarnations of change, Chaos Daemons and Gods tend to stick to swords, spells, claws, and cavalry, to the point that the same models for a 40k Chaos army can be used in Warhammer fantasy if you swap out the round bases for squares. In fact, for a god that was born from an ultra-tech alien species, a big technological advance for Slaanesh was when some Daemonettes discovered that a muscle-powered agricultural machine makes for a great weapon.
  • The Tau strikingly avert this. The Imperium first encountered them as primitives that had just discovered fire, then just under 6,000 years later were shocked that the alien Rising Empire with railguns and plasma rifles were the same xenos species. The Tau are even refining their technology between rulebooks so that equipment that was experimental and dangerous in one codex will be standard-issue and safe in the next. Too bad they have yet to face the true horrors of the Milky Way Galaxy...
  • The Tyranids are also defined by being an always-evolving Horde of Alien Locusts. This turned a war between Hive Fleet Gorgon and the aforementioned Tau into an interesting case of Lensman Arms Race, as both kept adapting their tactics and weapons to the last tactic the enemy used.

Theatre

• The eponymous town of Brigadoon, where a day inside is a hundred years outside.

Toys

• BIONICLE's planet of Bara Magna. Following a literal Earth-Shattering Kaboom, during which the planet Spherus Magna split into three, the society of the desert region-turned-planet found itself in shambles. They created a system in which disputes over resources would be settled with gladiator matches, and when the story continues 100000 years later, nothing is any different — even most of the people are still the same, thanks to their long-ass lifespans. Characters who were treated as inexperienced youngsters a hundred millennia ago are still seen as such. Super-powerful beings still continue their war that to the rest of the planet is only a memory. Some people, like Vastus, still feel guilty over what they've done in that war. True, the Iron Tribe died out and at some point, the Skrall Tribe moved from the Northern mountains to the desert, but that's pretty much it. Society and technology never moved an inch forward, even though the characters built high-tech implants into themselves and had the war-machines of old to study.

Video Games

• Downplayed in After the End: A Post-Apocalyptic America. The mod uses the base game's technology system, so technology does advance as time passes, but aside from a few rare artifacts that can be recovered from old ruins, society can't progress beyond the equivalent of the early Renaissance.
• Averted in Arcanum Of Steam Works And Magick Obscura where the world is in the process of going through the Industrial Revolution.
• In Asura's Wrath, Asura is killed a few times, and each time wakes back up into the land of the living multiple centuries later, always to a world that is identical to what he left, both in terms of humanity and the demigods. The first time he does this, he is dead for 12,000 years, though the Golden Spider snidely notes "that's nothing to a demigod like yourself" (keep in mind, his daughter Mithra is still a teenager after all this time). It's implied that the Gohma (basically giant murderous animals made out of magma) and Asura's fellow demigods both slaughter humans en masse on a regular basis to such a degree that it's surprising there even IS anything resembling a civilization remaining to begin with, as is evident from the fact that the demigods have gathered 7 trillion human souls worth of Mantra in Asura's absence and a large human city being completely wiped off the map and its thousands of souls being harvested is brushed off as being "just something they do" by one of the demigods.
• Lampshaded in one scene of Atelier Sophie 2: The Alchemist of the Mysterious Dream, where Sophie points out that even though the residents of Erde Wiege come from across space and time, the town of Roytale seems to have the same level of technology as in Sophie's time. She even mentions that according to Plachta (who has been around for centuries thanks to transferring her soul into a book, and later a doll), her hometown of Kirchen Bell has not changed much in 500 years. It's acknowledged that there's a limited range of time (from about 1000 years before Sophie's time, to 100 years after) from which Elmira can invite people, so no one comes from the very distant future. Kati suggests that because people in both Erde Wiege and Kirchen Bell don't have many problems, they don't feel the need to innovate.
• Battalion Wars on a purely technological level. Fluff from BWii reveals that most of the Solar Empire's military hardware has remained unchanged for two hundred years, and still isn't outdated.
• Played straight in Battle for Wesnoth, whose timeline crosses nearly 1,000 years without any tech level change, then an unspecified time passes during which technology advances far enough to put another star in the sky (well, technically a big nuclear moon) to improve the climate, which then crashes back down enforcing medieval stasis just in time for us to pick up the story again.
• Chronicles of Elyria, an MMORPG of all things, will avert this. While starting at a high middle age tech level, players and NPCs will be able to conduct research, and the developers have hinted that a steampunk industrial revolution is completely possible to pull off by the end of the storyline.
• Majorly averted in Chrono Trigger. Despite the "present-day" setting of 1000 AD having a strong medieval feel, a quick trip back to 600 AD makes it obvious that there has been some significant advancement in the intervening years. When the gang travels to 1999 AD, the world is even more technologically advanced than its Real Life counterpart. There is sort of future stasis after 1999, but that's justified by the After the End setting.
• Bitlife: No matter how many generations of people you decide to play as, technology will never advance.
• Civilization lets you create your own nation. However, if you get behind in technology, you can end up with knights versus armored tanks. A mod for Civilization V actually lets you enforce this trope in your game. In many games, it's possible to deliberately set the tech tree to start and/or be stuck at a certain phase (presumably for people who want to roleplay out certain ages without technology ruining the fun).
• In Code of Princess, the entire reason magic exists is to keep humanity in Medieval Stasis so they don't destroy themselves again.
• Crusader Kings:
  • The first and second games zig-zag the trope: The game is set up to end in 1453, before The Renaissance and the big changes kick in (nevermind that the real-life conditions needed for the Renaissance may have happened centuries earlier or be unlikely to trigger due to gameplay events), but the mechanics of gameplay means that things do not really change from whatever start date you pick (the earliest possible being 769, almost 700 years earlier). Armies consisting of the same mixes of infantry, cavalry, and archers/pikemen are raised from the same castles, cities, and temples, which are ruled by the same types of noble, mayor or priest. The tech system means that troops from more technologically advanced cultures will beat their equivalents from less advanced ones, and tech gradually increases with time as does levy size (as well as new holdings getting built), so armies gradually increase in size and power as the game goes on. The tech system also unlocks new buildings, making holdings richer and more powerful as the game goes on as well. There are also areas of the game that starts out as tribes or horse nomads and may transform into feudal or republican governments (including the player if they were one of them), and frequent wars tend to change the political and religious landscape. That said, the game's mechanics also means that empires and dynasties are much more stable than they were in real life (though given it's game over if your dynasty dies out, the latter can be excused by Rule of Fun), so if you start in 769 it's not at all unusual to see the Umayyad Caliphate of Cordoba (collapsed in 1031), the Abbasid Empire (fragmented and was subdued by the Seljuks in 1055), the Byzantine Empire (died a slow death between 1202 and 1453) and the Carolingian Dynasty (last male-line heir died in 1085) all still alive and kicking in 1453.
  • The third game in the series averts the trope, or at least downplays it heavily: Technological advances happen in 'eras', and new ones only unlock when a certain year is reached in-game (and only to cultures who have finished the previous era of technologies). This means certain men-at-arms, laws and buildings are hardlocked to only become researchable at certain points in the game, though some cultures (especially the Greek one) start out with a lot of benefits of advanced cultures already unlocked. Lag behind too much on technology and advancements in fortifications, siege engines and crossbows will give other cultures major advantages against you.
• Dark Souls has at least 1,000 years with no progress past the Medieval European Fantasy seen during the Action Prologue. It is implied that this is one of the problems with the Age of Fire in which the gods rule over man, and that should the player choose to become the Dark Lord, humanity will at least have a chance to break the stasis.
  • Dark Souls II confirms that there is a constant cycle at play of "fire and dark" and that great kingdoms constantly rise and then come crashing down due to monsters, insanity, and the undead curse. It turns out that the Emerald Herald was an attempt to break this cycle of fire and darkness.
  • "The Ringed City", the final DLC of Dark Souls III reveals that this all started because Gwyn feared the power of Humanity's Dark Soul so much that he placed a seal of fire on them to trap it. This seal became the Dark Sign. Driven by his paranoia, Gwyn literally sealed Humanity's potential and doomed the world to a Vicious Cycle of fire and darkness that eventually left nothing but ashes.
  • There's one character in the series who suggests the setting might actually avert this; Marvelous Chester from the first game's "Artorias of the Abyss" DLC. He designed in a distinctly different style than the rest of the game, having more of a Steampunk vibe than Medieval European Fantasy. Like the player character, he was pulled into the past from his own time, where technology has possibly advanced medieval times. No such setting is ever shown in the games, however.
• Dishonored provides a unique aversion. The world of Dishonored is essentially your standard Dark Fantasy setting in the middle of its industrial revolution. There's automobiles, tankers, Mini-Mecha, and guns, and "whale" oil is used as the primary fuel for all of this technology. There's many reasons for the technological progress of Dishonored's setting, but the biggest one seems to be that magic is heavily suppressed by the Abbey of the Everyman. The Stealth Sequel Deathloop shows that eventually culture and technology will evolve to the equivalent of the 1960s
• The Divinity video game series has a timeline that places a good portion of the games close to each other (justifying this with Divinity: Original Sin II, so that it can be more thematically and lore-wise close to the others), but Divinity: Original Sin takes place in a roughly medieval-to-renaissance-era level of technological development (with only a few Romanesque aesthetics in Cyseal). One thing to note is that the first Original Sin game takes place 1200 years before the other Divinity games — and the technological level seems largely unchanged, having never recovered from the era of Dragon Commander.
• Dragalia Lost justifies this trope. Turns out more advanced technology seems to have adverse effects on the game's world, and that gets the dragons very angry. Prerelease videos about the worlds history reveals that there was a tremendously more advanced human society a thousand years before the present, but then a Demon, known as Morsayati, was summoned and destroyed, everything. In order to stop him, the Goddess Ilia and the dragon Elysium united Humanity and Dragon so that they could seal the demon away forever. And humanity, in order to make peace with dragonkind, left their creations behind to live a more simple lifestyle. This along with the rise of a religion that actively encouraged stagnation is why technology has not advanced. Though recently some of that ancient technology was found and used again such as the androids and Manacasters.
  • The second anniversary event Forgotten Truths goes into great detail about what truly happened during that time. 1000 years ago when Dragons and Humans were at war an otherworldly being was summoned by Ilia, the same one who would eventually be revered as a goddess. This being grew to care about Ilia, who crafted him a body and taught him emotions. However, the human government planned on killing all the dragons in one fell swoop with mana bombs. In an attempt to stop them Ilia and company tried to warn the dragons but were found by Elysium instead. He explained that humanity was nothing but destructive whelps who would doom the entire world because of their greed. So he forced a Morton's Fork on her: the bombs that would be used to kill the dragons would have caused the world mana to effectively explode, creating a fire so large the world itself would be burned. So to prevent that from happening he effectively forced her to make the first Pack with him, creating Dragalia giving him complete control over all the worlds Mana and how it works, in order to force his desired order unto humanity and the world. This in turn also seemingly killed Ilia in the process. The aforementioned Otherworldly being, now known as Mordecai was consumed by such rage and hatred for Elysium that he became the demon that supposedly tried to end the world. Elysium then used Morsayati as a pawn, using the Black Mana the latter created to wipe the slate clean for his new world. A world where Dragons ruled over all, where technology and progress would remain in stasis forever. While Morsayati was sealed, Mordecai had to shove him through a portal to make it stick, and Ilia followed Mordecai under the belief that the problems would continue if she stuck around; the entire Church of Ilia was a fabrication created by Meene, both to help establish some sense of order and prevent this tragedy from repeating itself and a means to cope with the loss of her adoptive daughter.
• The land of Thedas from Dragon Age is hit hard by this. Due to over-reliance on magic coupled with distinct bans on in-depth research on the phenomenon, the nations of Thedas have remained stagnant socially and technologically since the fall of the Tevinter Imperium over 1200 years before the start of the story. The only groups that seem to have made any technological advancements are the dwarves and the Qunari. Both isolationist peoples with very little reliance on magic. Even then, the advancements are extremely slow and, socially, both are even more rigid than the general populace.
  • In Dragon Age II, a dwarven merchant tries to "court" the Qunari into selling him the secret to their "blackpowder"; the Qunari leader he's courting explains to all involved that non-Qunari aren't ready for the responsibility to use the substance (not to mention it's a significant advantage for their military to possess). Earlier in the quest Hawke can ask why the merchant he's bothering when lyrium can also act as an explosive. The merchant lists the problems with using lyrium as A) it's lethally toxic, B) its trade is controlled by the Chantry, and C) its blue-white glow makes its user visible at a distance. Blackpowder has none of these problems and would be a great help against the Darkspawn Horde that continually attacks the last of Dwarven civilization. So, while the setting's Applied Phlebotinum is useful, it's also restricting the development of the cultures reliant on it. Why the Qunari haven't developed personal firearms isn't certain, but who knows why the Qunari do anything they do? While the Qunari sense of honour might prohibit the use of personal firearms, they do have cannons for their ships.
    • This article takes the same position as the first entry as it postulates that the presence of magic itself is what is holding back Thedas, that technology does not advance because magic can be used to do the same things with greater ease combined with the apocalyptic nature of the Blights and the restrictive dogma of the Qun and the Chantry's holds on magic experimentation. The sentence "that mages are holding the world... back, even as they hold it up" could be used for every medieval fantasy setting.
    • As of the end of Dragon Age II this all may be changing; at least, it certainly appears that humanity has discovered gunpowder... and that gunpowder plus magic is very destructive. The future ramifications of this remain to be seen.
    • The epilogue of Dragon Age: Origins – Awakening has the Qunari sending assassins after a dwarven explosives expert who is dangerously close to figuring out how to make blackpowder. The Qunari actively enforce medieval stasis in this case to maintain their military advantage.
  • A recurring theme, confirmed by various ancient characters in Dragon Age: Inquisition, is that the world is actually in decline. Technology advances or is reclaimed, albeit slowly, but Older Is Better is still in full effect for weapons and armor and they haven't matched the level of before the First Blight yet. Magic is consistently getting weaker, and even by that time had been much diminished from when the Elven empire was at its height. Some things, like the old Imperial Highway, are not really beyond their current technology but do require manpower and logistical capabilities that the modern kingdoms don't have. Bizarrely enough this even effects the Darkspawn, who have no culture to lose; the First Blight devastated the Imperium and the Dwarves at the height of their power in a grinding conflict that lasted centuries, but each subsequent Blight was shorter (from nearly two centuries to decades to merely a year at most) and less and less successful than the last, despite their foes being shadows of what the First Blight faced.
    • Though the case of Blights might actually be justifiable. In the first one, no one knew how to kill the Archdemon, who is the main cause of the Blight on the surface (since Darkspawn numbers are essentially unlimited the only real way to deal with the Blight is to kill the one organizing them). When the first Grey Wardens figured how to kill the Archdemon (around 120 years after the Blight), the tide slowly turned. The Second Blight was devastating because it came right after great upheaval in the Tevinter, making them choose to cut their losses in most cases instead of fighting. As kingdoms become more and more organized and Wardens became a more powerful organization, the Blights got shorter. The case of the Fifth Blight might have been a special one as well mostly since it was artificially and accidentally caused by the Architect trying to end the Blights instead of due to the natural way of things, thus cutting the number of Darkspawn armies greatly.
• Dwarf Fortress can generate a world's history covering 200 to 1,000 years with normal parameters — even more, or less, with custom ones — and the only difference time makes to civilization is that empires will be bigger and more megabeasts will have died. This may change, but the developer has said that the technology present in the game won't become more advanced than "1400 AD."
  • On the other hand, players can make ludicrously complex death traps, like one that uses water funneled from a glacier to freeze enemies — it's essentially a liquid nitrogen thrower. This isn't even getting into other mechanisms; one player made a Turing-complete calculator.
• The Elder Scrolls: Technological progress is comparatively slow in Tamriel.
  • The main series of games span several centuries, and technology is at best late medieval and early Renaissance. The in-game historical fiction 2920, The Last Year of the First Era is set about 1300 years prior to the start of the series, and the world is largely the same as it is in the games. Similarly, The Elder Scrolls Online is a prequel to the main series set about 500 years prior to the main series and likewise shows the world much as it is centuries later in terms of technological and societal progress. There is some indication of technological progression between the First and the Second and Third eras, with evidence that the First Era was more akin to Tamriel's equivalent of the Bronze and Iron Ages. By the later Eras, technology was moving to a medieval-level — for example, armor technology in the First Era tended toward leather and bronze, and a man in full plate armor was thought to be a golem rather than a flesh-and-blood warrior. By the Second Era, metal armorsmithing was more common and plate armor began to appear. For reference, the Second and Third Eras covered about thirteen-hundred years, making both the Second and Third Eras only about three hundred years longer than the real-life Middle Ages.
  • Dynasties are also much longer-lasting than in reality. For example, the Direnni Hegemony of High Rock. An Altmeri (High Elf) clan, the Direnni's once controlled about 1/3 of Tamriel's land mass at their height thousands of years in the past. They're now a mere vestige of their former glory, controlling only the island of Balfiera in High Rock, but they still exist and have political influence.
  • At least in terms of technology and advanced knowledge, there are a few groups or individuals who provide exceptions. However, for various reasons, their advancements have been lost or have never proliferated throughout Tamriel. To note:
    • The Dwemer (Deep Elves or "Dwarves") were an extremely technologically advanced race. They were master enchanters and engineers, blending these skills to create Magitek Steampunk-style technology far beyond anything any other group in Tamriel has been able to create. They also (in)famously studied the "tonal architecture" of the world, essentially the laws of nature and physics, in order to find ways to circumvent them, making them literal Reality Warpers. One of the major ways they used this ability was to Ragnarok Proof their creations, allowing them to function in working order for thousands of years. Among their other known creations were Humongous Mechas, a Weather-Control Machine, a Steam Punk Cool Airship, and a computer-like machine capable of safely reading an Elder Scrolls which bypasses the usual nasty side effects. Unfortunately, while attempting to tap in to the power of the heart of a dead god in order to Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence, they did something which caused their entire race to disappear from the face of Nirn in an instant. Their creations have become Lost Technology, and, while enterprising scholars and mages over the thousands of years since have been able to study and repair their technology, no one has been able to actually replicate their achievements.
    • The Psijic Order is a secretive and selective monastic Magical Society, the oldest in Tamriel in fact. Through thousands of years of intensive study in the nature of magic, they have become able to utilize it in ways the rest of Tamriel is unable to match. However, their philosophy precludes them from sharing these abilities outside of the order. They subscribe to the belief that The World Is Not Ready, and must progress on its own, slowly and at a safe rate. Their many advanced feats include making their home island disappear without a trace (twice), summoning a storm to swallow the Maomer fleet whole, using various forms of teleportation and Astral Projection, Telepathy, and there are even reports that they possess a limited form of clairvoyance and sight into future events.
    • Sotha Sil is (was) one of the Dunmeri Tribunal deities, three formerly mortal advisors to Lord Nerevar who successfully tapped into the power of the aforementioned Heart of Lorkhan after the Dwemer (apparently) failed. In the millennia that followed, he spent much of his time withdrawn from the world in his self-built Clockwork City, studying the "hidden world". As revealed in The Elder Scrolls Online, Sotha Sil's creations reach full-blown Schizo Tech status, as he was creating complex computer systems, semi-organic cybernetic servants, turned himself into a Cyborg, and may have even uploaded his own mind into his city (meaning he may not have been killed during the events of Morrowind's "Tribunal" expansion) all while the rest of the world was stuck in medieval stasis. Given that he is (was) a reclusive Physical God, his creations and advancements have never proliferated outside of his city.
  • There is also evidence of this trope being Downplayed or Subverted in cycles throughout Tamriellic history, with technology progressing at times but the regressing for various reasons. For example, during the late 1st Era, the Second Tamriellic Empire under the Reman Dynasty engaged their rivals, the Aldmeri Dominion, in what is essentially a "space race" to explore Oblivion and Aetherius (which, given Nirn's Alien Sky, are essentially outer space and the celestial bodies). The Aldmeri used Sunbirds, ships somehow literally made from the Sun (which, in this universe, is a portal to Aetherius through which magic flows into Mundus). The Empire, on the other hand, used "Mothships", enormous Ancestor Moths bred, hollowed out, and flown into the void on strength of willpower alone. (Ancestor Moths have a special supernatural connection which also allows them to be used to somewhat protect mortal readers from the power of the Elder Scrolls, which is why the Scrolls are kept and read by the Cult of the Ancestor Moth.) The results of these expeditions have largely been lost to history, and operations gradually ceased because the trips were way too expensive for very little material gain (much like the real world space race between the US and the USSR after the initial trips). On the other hand, as magical technology regressed, mechanical technology has slowly improved, with new types of weapons and armor and machinery being slowly developed over the centuries. However, a great deal of both mechanical and magical knowledge has been lost over the millennia, due to a near-constant series of disasters, temporal anomalies causing Cosmic Retcons, political upheavals, and massive wars, on top of the interference by the Daedric Princes.
  • The largest exception in the series to date, at least when it comes to the political climate change, occurs during the 200 year Time Skip between Oblivion and Skyrim. With no Septim on the throne for the first time in nearly 500 years, the Empire begins to crumble as provinces secede while its ancient Arch-Enemy, the Aldmeri Dominion, reforms and grows in power under the leadership of the extremist Thalmor. On top of this were multiple destructive cataclysms, such as the Oblivion Crisis, the Umbriel Crisis (in which a massive continent from Clavicus Vile's Realm invaded Tamriel), the Red Year (in which the massive volcano at the heart of Morrowind detonated when an asteroid struck it, devastating one of the most prosperous provinces in Tamriel), and the Great War between the Empire and the Dominion. For those used to the climate in the first four games in the main series, seeing the Empire in such dire straits in Skyrim is quite the shock.
• Averted in the Fable games, where society does indeed change over the course of time. The first game uses a basic medieval setting; Fable II takes place 500 years later and has a distinct late Renaissance flavor (for instance, guns are commonplace); lastly, Fable III takes place 50 years after II and the setting mirrors the Industrial Revolution of the 1800s. At this rate, if Fable IV ever comes out of Development Hell, it could very well approach modern times.
• Fallout: In the 116 years between Fallout and Fallout 3, the world has apparently changed very little. Even decades-old settlements look like they were just recently built out of the scrap available, despite their settlers seemingly having plenty of food and protection (so little reason they wouldn't be making their towns any more comfortable). Take Megaton for example, which has been inhabited for three generations and is a major trade center in the Capital Wasteland, yet all structures date from the settlement's founding and mainly consist of scrap metal scavenged from planes from a nearby airfield.
  • Bethesda acknowledged in the Fallout 3 art book that the lack of societal reconstruction isn't realistic, and is only that way to keep with the series' style; it was a reintroduction to the series a decade after the last main game, and players would cry foul if the post-apocalyptic game didn't look post-apocalyptic enough. Also, the Capital Wasteland appears to be a worst-case post-apocalypse scenario:
    • As the location of the U.S. capital of Washington, D.C., it was one of the hardest-hit sites in the country. It's implied that nuclear bombs with a low explosive but high radiation yield were purposely chosen and used on the region to render it uninhabitable in the long-term (salting the earth, so to speak). The local watershed and much of the soil was consequently heavily irradiated. This made farming above subsistence level and obtaining enough potable water to sustain communities larger than a few dozen people extremely difficult before the activation of the Project Purity water purifier at the end of Fallout 3's main storyline.
    • Another factor is the presence of Super Mutants. On the West Coast, the tremendous threat these monsters posed didn't arise until a few decades after the Great War, and fortunately that threat was dealt with in the first game, allowing the formation of the early NCR. The Capital Wasteland was not so lucky; Super Mutants began to emerge within a year of the Great War and were on the verge of completely overrunning the region by the time the Brotherhood of Steel showed up 22 years before Fallout 3 and reclaimed some areas. Super Mutants are still a major threat to everyone at the time of Fallout 3, but there is some hope: the supply of the virus used to convert humans into new Super Mutants is running out, so in theory, they could all be killed off eventually if they don't uncover a new supply.
    • Yet another factor is the Talon Company, a large group of ruthless mercenaries plaguing the Capital Wasteland. They were hired by a mysterious unidentified client to deliberately sow chaos and destruction throughout the region so that it remains perpetually stagnant and lawless. To that end, they readily kill anyone who isn't a fellow Talon on sight (usually a one-sided fight since they possess weapons and equipment that are generally superior to what the locals have scrounged together).
    • It also doesn't help much that there's countless dog-sized (at the smallest) mutated creatures, feral ghouls, haywire homicidal commercial and military robots, slaver bands, psychotic raiders, etc. all over the Capital Wasteland. It's actually more of a surprise that there's anyone left alive not to mention able to make new tech in Fallout 3 at this point.
  • The Commonwealth is also a justified version. The Commonwealth was struck by a large nuke that missed Boston. However, The Institute's dicking around with the world above by either sending Super Mutants out there, rather than euthanizing them, sabotaging a united Commonwealth conference, sending out synths to kidnap and replace settlers. Not to mention the constant threat of Raiders, mutated creatures, and radiation storms.
    • The Institute controls a chunk of Massachusetts centered on Boston and has technology capable of creating Ridiculously Human Robots so advanced they pass for human and can even question their own existence as well as the morality of killing humans and/or other androids. It's implied the Institute was founded by the remnants of MIT or the in-universe equivalent. Even so, the Institute has fallen to this trope in a less visible way: in contrast to other factions, they remain content to remain within their walls with what they have, wasting resources on ridiculous projects like synthetic gorillas. Synths, as advanced as they are, were designed with the objective of destabilizing the region to lessen the chance of the Institute being discovered.
  • The world also never left The '50s in style and culture in-series, despite the war happening in 2077. While transistors were only invented shortly before The Great War, fusion power was, among other differences, causing technology and society to develop differently.
  • The Brotherhood of Steel in general defines this trope: they only care about preserving old world tech and they are in a slow death, mostly thanks to the NCR who don't care much about this trope.
  • A large part of Mr. House's plan in Fallout: New Vegas involves averting this trope. He intends to use Vegas to kickstart a new era of scientific progress, eventually culminating in space travel so humanity can abandon their craphole of a planet for something better.
    • The same goes for the NCR, just not to that scale and much slower. By the time of New Vegas California is near pre-war standards.
    • This would be easier, if the Lone Wanderer would just share the captured alien ship from the "Mothership Zeta" DLC. Of course, the first thing most would do is fire that Wave-Motion Gun at any area of the planet they don't like.
    • The fan-made mod "Mothership Zeta Crew" addresses the issue of the wasted potential of the orbiting alien ship with an ongoing story-driven questline on par with official DLC.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Justified in Final Fantasy X, for two reasons. First, there exists a gargantuan sea monster named Sin that exists to destroy all the high tech it can find. Second, the state religion made high tech taboo in the hopes of staving off said sea monster. Final Fantasy X-2, set after the delegitimizing of the religion and destruction of Sin, shows that given the chance, Spira can rapidly take to new technology; an Easter Egg even implies that, without the forced technology stasis, Spira eventually turns into the world of Final Fantasy VII.
  • Final Fantasy VI. 1,000 years after the War of the Magi, civilization has rediscovered steam engines and "...high technology reigns." However, 80% of the world is locked in medieval stasis with a Victorian skin, as the only signs of any sort of technology are Narshe (steam and coal), Figaro Castle (but not South Figaro), and the Empire's Magitek. Although there are also gramophones in most houses.
  • Averted in Final Fantasy XII and the other Ivalice Alliance games, where the further you go along the in-world timeline the more things have gone to hell, mostly likely due to the sort of turmoil caused when your religious warfare gets even the gods involved. In Final Fantasy Tactics mention is made of how they no longer have the technology to make airships and by Vagrant Story even magic's been largely forgotten.
  • Final Fantasy XIV invokes this as a plot element. The history of the game's word is filled with civilizations that reached the societal and technological equivalent to anywhere between the medieval to early Renaissance period, a brief period of prosperity, and then a Calamity undoes it all^note Ones we've seen or heard about include a massive earthquake across the entire planet triggered by powering up an aether-fueled tower to open a gate to the world of demons, a worldwide flood triggered by overuse of the land's aether, and the release of a bound Primal in a failed attempt to drop the artificial moon that turned out to be housing it on the planet. One expansion also involves the player character stopping another Calamity that would have been caused by the indiscriminate release of a chemical weapon. and humanity is forced to start over - and much of the story is about how this is intentional on the part of a group called the Ascians, who are constantly triggering these Calamities in the name of resurrecting their god Zodiark. In the most recent cycles (the end of the Sixth Astral Era in 1.0, the beginning of the Seventh for 2.0 onwards), much of the more advanced technologies developed aren't even independent works, but rather the result of reverse-engineering leftovers from the Third Astral Era's Allagan Empire, with many of the people involved admitting even they don't know how every little thing about them works.
• Fire Emblem uses this trope a hell of a lot. While politics and society may change a bit, architecture, transportation, weaponry, and technology in general is pretty much the same as it was 1200, 1000, 800, or however many years it was since the great cataclysm or war between humans and monsters/demons/dragons that sets up the game's plot. Most games also take place in different universe however, explaining this to an extent.
  • Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War and Fire Emblem: Thracia 776 take place a hundred years and change before Marth's era on another continent per supplementary material, however its also stated that Marth's continent, Archanea, was extremely primitive 100 years ago. Archanea has also developed primitive motor vehicles and cannons, unlike Jugdral, downplaying this trope.
  • Awakening, set 2000 years after Marth's era, Exaggerates this trope, though many liberties are taken with past plots. Apparently, records are well-kept enough that Chrom is able to identify historical figures by sight alone. Chrom is also aware of the majority of the heroes and villains from earlier games. Based on the lack of Cannons and motor vehicle that existed in Marth's time, one could even argue technology has regressed!
  • In Fire Emblem: Three Houses, the continent of Fodlan has stayed in a pseudo-medieval age for the past thousand years, but the ancient civilization of Agartha has stuff like ballistic missiles, giant robots, and automatic sliding doors. It's indicated that they consider themselves superior to the ordinary medieval humans who live on the surface. Justified by content from the DLC, which suggests that the Archbishop has been using her influence to slow technological progress on the continent in order to prevent another civilization like the Agarthans from rising.
• In For Honor, technology doesn't appear to have changed since the start of the 1000 year war that ended just prior to the game. Justified in that the war occurred due to a planet-wide cataclysm that reshaped the continents from (per Word of God) our Earth circa 1000 A.D. into the world of For Honor, which would be more than enough to cause the collapse of civilization and slow new advances. Additionally, the introduction of the Wu-Lin in the Marching Fire update (who have access to early gunpowder weapons) and later the Pirate (who carries a flintlock pistol) shows that technology is still advancing, just very slowly.
• Justified in Golden Sun lore. The Golden Age of Man ran on Alchemy-powered Magitek; when Alchemy's power was sealed away, the Adepts and craftsmen dwindled in power and number, beastmen went extinct, the very world itself began to crumble at its edges, and Muggles who had no way of working with the Magitek became the dominant race. As a result, civilization experienced a huge kickback but appears to have been slowly rebuilding technology even in the first two games, going by NPC chatter about newfangled developments in architecture and nautical engineering. Then the heroes reverse the seal on Alchemy, and during Dark Dawn there's obviously a fantasy-counterpart Renaissance in full swing.
• Guild Wars 2 averts this trope, with the 250 years between the first and second games having given way to full-scale industrialization by the Charr — to the extent that the Charr have large gun platforms, cannon weaponry, and even primitive tanks. Then there's Asura technology.
  • The dates are about a thousand years behind the actual technology level. 1000 AD is clearly similar to the late 20th century in our world, just in a land where many of the medieval buildings have been preserved instead of torn down. 600 AD is The High Middle Ages (although 200 AD might have been more appropriate in that case). 1999 AD looks like something out of The Jetsons.
• Guilty Gear: Following the discovery of magic in the onset of the 3rd Millennium, civilization began to technologically regress until by the events of the games in the 2200's most of the world looks little different from the Industrial Revolution. Electronic devices are classified as "Black Tech" and banned by the U.N., along with most scientific development. The independent nation of Zepp, which is a gigantic kilometres-long airship flying around the Indian Ocean, is the one exception to the rule.
• Invoked in the King's Quest universe: Expanded Universe material says that magicians, mythical creatures, The Fair Folk, fairy tale characters, and those sympathetic to them withdrew to another universe to escape the encroachment of "enlightenment" thought that wanted to study them into irrelevance or destroy them through disbelief. There is evidence that they're taking a Magitek route instead of conventional industrialization.
• The Legacy of Kain games jump around by millennia but always stay firmly stuck in vague middle ages with very little technology thrown in. However, the world of Nosgoth is in a permanent state of biological and spiritual decay, so advancement might be hampered.
  • In the original backstory of the first game, there was minimal to no advancement in a 5,000 year period; later games retconned this to only 500 years.
  • Interestingly, one game in this series completely averts this; Blood Omen 2 takes place 400 years after the original Blood Omen, and in that time has Nosgoth go from a medieval fantasy world with sparse dashings of magitek and steampunk to a full-on industrial revolution(still, technically, magitek and steampunk, but on a much grander scale). Averting this trope is one of the reasons that Blood Omen 2 is the least popular game in the franchise; most fans felt it didn't fit with the overall tone of the series (it also exists in an alternate timeline created by the various time travel shenanigans in the other games, so it has absolutely no effect on anything). Possibly justified, since the ones spearheading this revolution are the Hylden, demonic beings mostly unaffected by the decay affecting everyone else since they rejected being part of the Wheel of Fate. And their reason for doing so is hardly benevolent — they want to complete the weapon that will wipe out everyone on Nosgoth but themselves.
• The world of The Legend of Dragoon seems to have barely changed within eleven thousand years. This is even a plot point, as the Big Bad wants to destroy the world so a new one can take its place and advance farther. It's eventually revealed that God planned on destroying the world over 11,000 years before the story takes place, and possibly intended to do so every 108 years.
• The Legend of Zelda has three timelines displaying varying levels of this (and standard Medieval Stasis in the era prior to the branching point, from The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword through the first third of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time). Schizo Tech exists throughout, of course, although the amount seen and its prominence varies with the game's tone.
  • Timeline A, containing The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past through Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, averts the trope in a strange way as there is a great technological regression. There is a clear loss of historical and architectural knowledge, loss of more complex clothing technologies, a large population crash, and the loss of much of the Schizo Tech artifacts such as jukeboxes, telephones, hardhats, etc. Out-of-universe, this can be explained by the original two games being the last two games in this timeline. In-universe, this is explained as this timeline being one where Link lost at the end of Ocarina of Time and Hyrule entering a long period of decline afterwards.
  • Timeline B, containing The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask through The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures, has stasis throughout, with no seen loss of random schizo tech or noted advances or losses. Since it only contains three games, technology could still be progressing, just not enough to notice by the end of the timeline.
  • Timeline C, containing The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker through The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks, averts the trope the normal way, with a slow but noticeable technological progression, including photography, steam engine-powered boats, and trains. This is likely caused by the massive social shift and need to adapt to the Fall of Hyrule and migration to island living.
  • Across the franchise (most notably in The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild) there is evidence that previous generations had technology that would be considered advanced even in the modern-day real world (such as artificially-intelligent robots and Giant Mecha). Even the Beamos enemy, which is present in most games, is evidence of this. By all appearances there seem to have been two periods of high technological advancement — one before the chronologically earliest game, Skyward Sword, that was ended by a war against demons; the other 10,000 years before Breath of the Wild, in a point where Hyrule developed incredibly advanced technology again but slowly crumbled back to a medieval level over the interval leading up to the game proper.
    
    Notably, Breath of the Wild actively invokes this trope. Set so far in the future that it might be any of the three above timelines, the Sheikah managed to begin recovering, reinventing, and rediscovering advanced Lost Technology. This sudden advancement and advantage to one tribe scared the king so much he commanded them to bury all of it and abandon advanced technology research.
• The Longest Journey and its sequel posit that, way back in history, the inhabitants of the world in question had to make a choice between "magic" and "science", and two parallel worlds were created, between which the player character can skip. Our PC is from the Science world, apparently 20 Minutes into the Future, whereas the Magic world is still on swords and bows because anyone born with ingenuity and inventiveness ends up in the Science world.
  • There's also the fact that the laws of physics exist in a state of flux in Arcadia. Making a power plant must be hard when the technical principles you relied on yesterday have been inverted and will probably invert again by the end of the week.
  • Twice, however, groups have attempted to introduce the Arcadians to new technology. In the first game, the Vanguard are offering people inventions from Stark (the science world) so as to subvert the power base of the Sentinels who believe that Status Quo Is God. In the sequel, the magic-hating Azadi Empire takes over a large chunk of Arcadia and introduces airships and steam engines. However, it is mentioned that this is still Magitek, as this is the only way to make them function reliably.
  • On the other side of the coin, most advanced Stark tech suddenly fails after the Collapse (the rebuilding of the Barrier between the worlds). Most in fandom speculate that this is because some of this tech (e.g. antigravity, FTL) defies the laws of physics and only worked through the unintentional use of magic. This explanation also justifies the high number of antigravity accidents prior to the Collapse, as magic is inherently chaotic. The entire world had to revert to using old tech, losing all contact with extrasolar colonies.
• Averted in Luminous Arc 2, where lapis-based science and technology was notably being used and developed in Carnava. A few scientists also mentioned steam-power energy from foreign countries without magic.
• Lunar: Eternal Blue takes place 1000 years after Lunar: The Silver Star, yet there are practically no advances in technology.
• The Mass Effect universe has a zig-zagging example of the trope. On one hand, technology doesn't seem to have advanced too much since the Council started inhabiting the Citadel. On the other hand, we do know that it is advancing technologically, as more powerful "heat sink," based weapons are the norm by ME2, as well as omni-gel proof systems, and by Mass Effect 3, Mech suits and omnitool lightsabers have come into practice. On the third hand, everything about the technology in the Mass Effect universe is a trap. Everything is reverse engineered from technology left behind by the Protheans, who reverse-engineered the tech from another race that came before them, who did the same thing to the previous race, and so on and so forth. The entire tech base is a trap set by the Reapers, who use organic life to further their own technology before taking anything good while having the benefit of millions of years of development to crush anything in their path.
  • On the fourth hand you have the Geth, the machine race that happen to not only have the most advanced technology (aside from the Reapers) and progress at the fastest rate, but since they believe in self-determination, all of their tech is of their own design and may be the only suitable counter against the Reapers.
  • Humanity's tendency to avert this is lampshaded in the second game, where by 2185 their businesses have become responsible for nearly every new technological innovation currently out on the market. This has forced the other races to break out of their complacency in order to keep ahead of the curve.
  • One small aversion. You go out for Wrex's family armor, but it is made very clear that it is obsolete (it's well over a thousand years old) to any other armor you can give him. Wrex wants it for sentimental reasons and afterwards doesn't have a problem with you grinding it to Omni-Gel.
• Medieval II: Total War: If you continue to play the game well after you pass/fail the requirements needed to beat it, and assuming you and another faction is still playing, you could potentially see Europe celebrating the year 1900 AD, yet have everything look as it did way back 900 years ago.
• Metal Slug takes place in the 2030s, but technological advancement seems to have stopped after World War II (with some Vietnam trappings like helicopters). The sequels veer into Schizo Tech, where one moment you'll be fighting propeller planes and the next you'll be fighting a giant laser-spamming robot in power armor.
• Averted, to a degree, in Might and Magic VIII. Three plot points centres around recent technological and magical inventions (though you only deal with two of them in any one given play-through): The stolen Nightshade Brazier, the Necromancers' Skeleton Transformer, and the Regnan Pirates' Prototype Super-Cannon. In addition, the Handwave given for vampires in the party being able to walk around at day is that the Necromancers' Guild recently developed a new sort of amulet that protects a vampire against the sunlight. It's too costly for producing in any larger numbers, though, so it's only vampires that need to travel around that gets them.
  • Might and Magic games don't even sport a medieval stasis.
    • It's actually a sci-fi series where worlds have been created or seeded by a highly technologically advanced race, called the Ancients. However, due to a war with an alien race, the Kreegans, the whole system collapsed and many worlds fell into barbarism for as much as 12 centuries. Considering the fact that this actually happened in the course of our own history, it's not strange. Also changes in styles, fashion, and sophistication in building, etc., are clearly evident. Newer castles are depicted with different styles, weapon technology changes, newer metals are used, etc. It's just that the actual games span a time-frame of no more than a century, so these changes are not evident from game to game, so much; it's rather historical evidence present in the games (items that you find, building styles, etc). Games other than Might and Magic VIII or IX, feature actual laser guns, which are from the time prior to the event marked as the Silence (see spoiler). There are also spacecrafts and robots from the same period and tons of other technological stuff, depicting the advance of the Ancients.
    • Heroes Chronicles used the same towns as Heroes of Might and Magic III while covering a period many centuries in length (the chronologically first has been fan-dated to around 200 AS, while the chronologically last takes place around 1172 AS). Given that the series also used a grass/forest town to represent the Vori Snow Elves, this is likely Gameplay and Story Segregation, however.
• Monster Hunter plays with this. Technology has visibly advanced as the series as gone on; the first game was very much Bronze Age/prehistoria with some very primitive firearms, but the latest games feature widespread use of balloons and airships, as well as advanced mechanical contraptions like the Switch Axe. However, society as a whole hasn't progressed past the hunter-gatherer stage after all this time. Agriculture does exist, as indicated by the resource-multiplying farms you have access to in later games, it is just not widely spread, as that would require having to move outside the protective walls of the cities. Supplemental material released only in Japan reveals that the world takes place after the fall of an "Ancient Civilization".
• This seems to be the norm for The Realms outside of Earthrealm in Mortal Kombat. With Earth having tech that's already ahead of its real life counterpart. While all the other Realms never seeming to advance past medieval technology, but making up for it with more common access to magic and an abundance of powerful races and creatures, as well as their denizens generally being longer lived. This is especially odd, since many of the other Realms have had contact with Earthrealm for eons and have seen how useful human advances in weaponary are first hand. And have even recruited humans that make use of that technology and on at least one occasion, bought large quantities of fire arms. But none of them seem to have thought of trying to replicate human tech themselves.
• The Myth prequel Myth III: The Wolf Age changes little from the original games despite being set 1000 years earlier, as commented on in this review. Dwarves still fight mainly with grenades, and at one point get a flamethrower to boot.
  • The backstory has them at this level for several millennia before that. They never have more than a millennium at a time to progress before the Leveler knocks civilization back down, though.
  • The Humans and Dwarves were down to one city each at the end of Myth III, so even maintaining the status quo is impressive. The backstory is that civilization rises up only to be toppled again every thousand years, but even so they've been locked for at least six cycles.
• Averted in Paladins thanks to the discovery of crystals. A powerful energy resource, these crystals launched the formerly Heroic Fantasy Realm into a crystal-powered technological revolution that saw the creation of marvels such as Mini-Mecha, firearms as advanced as assault rifles, and flying machines.
• Justified in Phantasy Star IV. The events take place 1000 years after Phantasy Star II. The general society has not been in stasis, they just had been so devastated that it took them all this time to simply reach the current level. While all that the ancient systems were doing was sustaining themselves and basic environment conditions (well, not entirely).
• Pillars of Eternity has a justification for this, though you don’t find out how until The Reveal at the end; an Ancient Conspiracy led by the Big Bad is actively working to manipulate society and enforce a Medieval Stasis because they’re worried that if people advance far enough, they’ll be able to discover that the gods are actually giant Magitek A.I.s created by the Precursors. They’re not completely successful at it; while they’ve more or less successfully suppressed animancy and other magical studies, technology is slowly advancing to the point that current society on Eora is actually implied to be more technologically advanced than that of said Precursors.
• Shin Megami Tensei IV: The Eastern Kingdom of Mikado. The Law Faction's goal is to permanently seal it in this trope by putting the Four Archangels in charge (Gabriel's been hard at work keeping it that way for almost a millennium and a half) and detonating a Magical Particle Accelerator in the middle of Tokyo, wiping out what seems to be Humankind's last bastion of wisdom and knowledge in the world. Conversely, the Chaos side wants to blow open the doors to Naraku and allow demons to march straight into the capital, forcing the locals to either fight them and learn more about war and evolution, or just die, leaving the Tokyo natives to reconquer their world.
• The Spirit Engine 2 is a borderline example. Gunpowder is just beginning to become used, and classic knights are still being employed, especially by local militias and as headhunters, but the progress is very, very slow. It's later revealed that the Rakari have been trying to hinder progress as much as possible, mentally dulling humanity and mindwiping (potential) inventors, but their grip is slipping, which is why they couldn't prevent the (re-)emergence of gunpowder.
• Starbound features a race of sentient robots left over from a failed society experiment that, due to a glitch, are stuck in the medieval ages both socially and technologically. This ironically allowed them to survive as all of the other experiments eventually wiped themselves out once they had the technology to do it.
• Tales Series:
  • Apparently, in the 4,000-ish years between Tales of Symphonia and Tales of Phantasia, the technology went from robots to Medieval European Fantasy. A great magitek war (and the destruction of the civilization of Thor by a meteor) was to blame for it, apparently.
  • For that matter, Tales of Symphonia had some pretty heavy medieval stasis going on, with 4000 years of stagnation caused by the constant waxing and waning of mana and repeated predations on all the world's nations by the Desians. It eventually turns out that this is due to a system intentionally set in place by the Knight Templar Big Bad to prevent the humans from inventing magitek devices again and setting off another great war. The hero's defeat of the Big Bad is, then, responsible for the later war which almost wiped out mankind and pushed the survivors back to a medieval level.
    • What actually caused the war was long-standing social issues that weren't resolved between pureblood elves and humans and the half-elves stuck in between. As half-elves keep being rejected by the elves every single time the humans do something the elves don't like, the purebloods isolate themselves from the world and the half-elves are forced to try and make their way in human society, including the creation of magitechnology, in order to gain acceptance, after being rejected by Elven Society. In the Phantasia game, the heroes criticize the members of the archetypal Hidden Elf Village of the game's setting having ultimate responsibility for the Half-Elves' actions and the damage caused by magi technology because they would toss the Half-Elves aside ''without teaching them of the dangers of magitek'' or any other lessons in regards to respecting the power of mana that they wield beyond being something very convenient or force the children to grow up without their elf parents to teach them the intricacies of magic and its relation to the world. The creators of the Mana Canon seen in Phantasia are even pointed out as being exclusively human raised, and as such were completely ignorant as to the repercussions of making mana powered weaponry and technology.
  • Tales of Berseria toys with the trope. Despite being in the high age of sail, most of the world remains completely unexplored but uninhabited, and when scouts do go to the Outer Seas, they find pristine ruins loaded with treasure. Many regions of the game have ruins of completely different architectural styles, often lost civilization technology shows up that's at about the same level as the current world, but runs on such fundamentally different theory it's impossible to even reverse-engineer. Eizen, a treasure and history buff, mentions that there are a lot of independent civilizations that appear to have risen, and then fallen very suddenly, preventing any of them from getting much further than the current era is. It turns out this is a side-effect of something bigger: humanity would eventually destroy the world with the Malevolence they produce as a by-product of simply existing, so they periodically have their free will be utterly suppressed to let it disperse. This takes a few generations; by the time it wears off, those left to rediscover independent thought have had the academic slate wiped clean and start over. This cycle is broken at the end of the game, so by the time of Tales of Zestiria 1000 years later, technology has continued to advance.
• Touhou Project, sort of. The setting was a backwater back in the Meiji era when it was sealed off from the rest of Japan, so this really makes sense. Then the kappa started building sci-fi technology and a hell-crow turned into a living nuclear furnace, and things are starting to head towards Schizo Tech.
  • This was averted earlier with Rinnosuke; the man runs a shop that sells "odd things," although most of the stuff consists of things that fell across the border. Among other things, he has a Game Boy, an iPod, and a small personal heater. All of these things work, he just doesn't know how.
  • Also in the second game of the series, Rika is apparently the only human character who possesses the knowledge needed to construct motorized vehicles. She uses it to build tanks.
  • An aversion comes from the Moriya Shrine characters, who transferred to Gensokyo from the Outside World relatively recently and are attempting to introduce more advanced technology like hydroelectric dams and even nuclear power. This isn't just for Gensokyo's advancement but because Kanako, one of the shrine's patron goddesses, wants to shift her godly domain to technology so she can get more worship; she's also the one responsible for the aforementioned hell-crow. However, when they discuss this in one of the official manga, Kanako remarks that it'll take a few generations for any of their ideas (even lesser ones like a cable car) to be implemented. Nevertheless, by pooling together resources with the tengu and the kappa, she's able to successfully build her cable car just a few years later with a minimum of fuss; earlier, she was unable to execute the plan by herself.
• Averted in the Trails Series. 1200 years ago the world was ruled by a civilization of advanced technology with airships, elemental powers, and left behind several artifacts of great power and utility after the Great Collapse. Society across Zemuria rebuilt itself after around 1200 years. The aversion comes when a scientist is able to reverse engineer artifacts and develops a new technology called Orbments, basically quartz crystal put into clockwork with different elemental properties. This single invention kickstarted the Orbal Revolution, allowing the creation of Orbal lightbulbs, working power grids, Orbal guns that shoot plasma, and phones, all within the span of 50 years. It's portrayed as chaotically and realistically as one might imagine as old middle-age maps are redrawn, several countries have urbanized their cities, warfare has changed entirely as a few well-trained Orbal users can level small armies with magic, and democracy and free thought have caught on, leaving nobles struggling to keep their power under outdated monarchies. The plot of The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky comes from the fact that the small country of Liberl has suddenly become incredibly important as they sit atop a wealth of Septium crystals for mining quartz, and the Erebonian Empire wants it, similar to the effects fossil fuels have in developing countries. Not only did the world go through the equivalent of the Industrial Revolution, but they did it at triple the speed, making it a very exciting time to live.
• Warcraft:
  • On the one extreme, the Night Elves have existed in what seems to be a state of technological and societal stasis for ten thousand years. However, this is explicitly shown to be part of the (very conservative) race's way of life; a large segment of their population goes into otherworldly trances, sometimes for centuries at a time, and the remainder are so devoted to their sylvan ways that until recently they tended to disparage all technology or arcane magic. The fact that they were immortal at the time and this represented a single generation also contributed. As the story progresses after the loss of their immortality, changes soon start to emerge. Such as them allowing the use of arcane magic once again.
  • And on the other extreme, the civilizations of capital city Dalaran, the Burning Legion, the gnomes, the goblins, the high elves, and the draenei and their naaru patrons all have access to exotic (and in the case of the gnomes, goblins, and dwarves, extremely quirky) Magitek technology.
  • Last but certainly not least is the fact that many of these cultures, having allied and interacted, are beginning to pick up each other's tricks. This leads to some interesting interactions in the present, more internationalist era, such as an Alliance Steampunk airship, golems being produced like mass-produced robots, or a druid of the Cenarion Expedition excitedly studying super-advanced Ethereal Magitek for possible ecological renewal purposes.
  • In Warlords of Draenor, Garrosh Hellscream goes back in time and helps the Orcs of Draenor avert this by granting them a powerful artifact that kickstarts an industrial revolution. The new "Iron Horde" rejects the Fel magic that corrupted the original Horde in favor of the power of iron.
• Lampshaded in Wizardry VII, where the party comes across a laser rifle of sorts and wonders why anyone would create such a thing when a few sword swipes would do just as well.
• Xenoblade Chronicles 1 has a very odd mix of technology, featuring flying ships, killer robots, and guns that shoot healing magic alongside katanas and strange shield-spear hybrid weapons. It is nevertheless still in stasis. The backstory shows that technology doesn't get much of a chance to develop as their god decides to erase all life whenever he becomes afraid they might stumble upon space travel and leave him because he needs them to sustain his lifeforce.
• Xenoblade Chronicles 2 plays with the trope a bit. The world is largely dependent on Titan technology — that is, literally building mechanical attachments onto the living creatures to make transports, airships, and artillery platforms. It gets there using equipment brought up from the Cloud Sea by salvagers — nobody knows how salvaged stuff works, only that it does, and how to use it in their own creations. Amalthus laments this represents a technological regression, as pre-Aegis War empires were capable of creating mechanical marvels that can't be reproduced in the game's time. It turns out that salvage is actually 20 Minutes into the Future Earth technology — the Cloud Sea is a benevolent Grey Goo that's reconstructing stuff out of whatever falls in, explaining how the world never runs out of new salvage to use. However, Amalthus is also a giant hypocrite, as his egocentrism and god complex have him keeping the entire world dependent on an unsustainable resource he controls the distribution of. It never seems to cross his mind humanity might actually be getting somewhere if he stayed out of the way.

Webcomics

• Parodied in 8-Bit Theater, when Red Mage confronts Thief about the supposed superiority of elves, who have technology on par with the rest of the world despite having a 9000-year headstart. Thief responds with something to the effect of "Er... we like it that way. You inferior beings wouldn't understand." Plus there are ruined ancient civilizations everywhere who had helicopters, flying castles, killer robots, cold fusion reactors, which indicates that progress does occur elsewhere, it just keeps getting knocked back in anachronism every so often. Occasionally because of the elves, but mostly because everyone is Too Dumb to Live.
• The world of Dan and Mab's Furry Adventures has individuals who are tens of thousands of years old and the world was stuck in the middle ages until rather recently. Some city-states have information age Schizo Tech but swords and arrows are the standard weaponry world over. It's suggested that the magic-using Creatures have suppressed technological development to prevent non-magical Beings from presenting a threat to them. It's also been hinted at as an "it doesn't work here anyway" situation, in the sense that the whole world is suffused with natural-law-disrupting magic. Jyrras, who has been pushing the envelope of technological development, had to first invent a very laborious, very slow, very expensive method for removing magic from materials before he could use the resulting metal to create the very-first firearm. (Meanwhile, the rest of his tech is either outright Magitek or... somewhat unpredictable.)
• Drowtales:
  • This trope is played straight concerning the technology, but there is a slow cultural, social and political evolution during the 1000 years of the moonless age. for example, great clans rise and fall, the faith in Sharess was strong but is now challenged by demonic worshipping.
  • Averted in technology, as well. The characters are seen using anything from portable music players to artificial limbs and magically enhanced sniper crossbows. And then there are the Jaal'darya biogolems and other organic tech that is an extremely recent innovation. It's all largely based on magic, but it develops and advances very much like the technology in our world.
• In Floyd by Aaron Williams, at one point "ten thousand years" are mentioned, with an even longer history prior. This is longer, in the real world, than written history has actually existed (though this may be an After the End situation as well).
• Europa in Girl Genius is a world of Schizo Tech, where advanced robotics and medicine exist but things such as phones, cars, and radios don't and the most advanced form of long-distance travel is an airship. At one point, Gil showed his friend/rival Tarvek his prototype for heavier than air flying machine and he treated it like it was some type of evil magic. This is because the world is run by mad scientists who are more interested in making monsters and death rays than any form of practical technology, meaning the world hasn't had any real type of major advancements in centuries. It's also been shown that the ruling powers of Europa keep the most powerful and advanced technology for themselves and kill off anyone who tries to discover how their tech works or successfully recreates it.
• Nodwick also suggests that a time traveler's mistake knocked society back to a medieval level from which it never recovered, magic is there but used by very few, which contributes to the problem.
• This Full Frontal Nerdity strip invokes the trope by name, as the players in a Tabletop Roleplaying Game are pleased to note that their characters' actions have preserved a status quo which suits them just fine.

Web Original

• The entire world of Dino Attack RPG, because it was inspired by LEGO. Though most of the action occurred in relatively modern environments there is "Castle Cove" (providing a literal example), along with the tropical sea in which people are still living as in the late 18th and early 19th centuries (complete with swashbuckling buccaneers), the vast desert region that is home to the town of Gold City — which more or less resembles the setting for a Sergio Leone Western, and let's not get started on any of the crazy futuristic space stuff.
• Limyaael's Fantasy Rants: Limyaael has written a rant specifically on how to keep these kinds of settings plausible.
• In Neopets, which time period the stasis settles into strongly depends on which of the various lands you're in. Most of them, like Neopia Central, have Technology Levels hovering around the first half of the twentieth century. Meridell and Brightvale, however, have been in medieval times for over one thousand years, as evidenced by Neoquest. Tyrannia is locked in the Stone Age, while more advanced technology is very strongly tied to Virtupets Space Station, which, incidentally, this is why the staff tells Neopian Times writers to be wary of giving someone who doesn't live there advanced technology, as explained in one editorial. Very few want to be caught using something that might implicate them of being associated with an alien invader hellbent on the enslavement of their planet.
• In The Salvation War, the realms of Heaven and Hell are stuck in this state, partially because the angels and demons are very conservative and long-lived, and partially because the respective leaders (Yahweh and Satan) have discouraged technological growth because advanced underlings are dangerous underlings, and instead built cults of personality around themselves that resulted in societies of fanatical devotion to egomaniacal despots. This is mostly the reason why the humans utterly crushed them both.
• The Pactlands in Engines of Creation has made few advances in terms of technology in one thousand years, largely due to the control and flow of information.
• The oceanic multi-species civilization known as the sea stewards in Serina remains stable for more than a million years as it revolves around maintaining the sustainability of a highly productive ecosystem. The predictability of the environment and a lack of access to mineral resources due to them being under ice caps makes technological progress unlikely, even as the ice slowly creeps towards the equator.
• Springhole: This is advised against in Tips & Ideas To Create More Believable Sword 'n Sorcery Worlds, noting that while the real medieval era didn't have technological progress happening as fast as now, it definitely still occurred. Anti-technology ideologues (which didn't even exist then in reality) would soon be outcompeted by non-Luddites, and even lacking some inventions (e.g. gunpowder/firearms) wouldn't stop innovations, especially if magic exists which could assist technological creation (with the scenario of making new alloys or other material using it). Magical progress would also still count, especially if it's basically that world's technology, and societies with the equivalent of our tech that's done by magic also can't be called medieval. Syera notes that some spells in fantasy actually are powerful enough to equal or surpass things which made medieval staples like castles obsolete.
• Averted in Tales of MU, which is supposed to be a "medieval fantasy setting, five hundred years later," with Magitek in place of modern technology. A side story set two hundred years in the past of the main story resembled America's colonial period.

Western Animation

• Deliberately invoked by the people of Tarkon in Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers. A devastating war happened on their planet many centuries ago, and the people were hell-bent on making sure that they never again reached a technology level high enough to cause the same kind of devastation. Unfortunately, the rest of the galaxy started to notice Tarkon, and the people are Human Aliens, who are implied to be perfectly compatible with the Queen's psychocrypt. Cue one princess waging open rebellion against her society and her father to try and get her planet catching up.
• In Adventures of the Gummi Bears, humans forced the Gummis across the sea and into hiding centuries ago by the time the series proper starts. Yet the timeline still seems to be stuck in the Theme Park Version of The Middle Ages. However, it is noted that the entire reason for the conflict was because humans wanted Gummi technology, which is quite advanced compared to what humans have.
  • In the course of the series, the Gummis are known more for their magical prowess and general cleverness, but two standout examples of their technology would be a human-sized, combat-capable Mini-Mecha, and the Gummiscope, which could be used as either a long-distance communication device (complete with an animatronic hand for transcribing the message on the receiving end!), or a colossal Death Ray. In addition, they also had access to heavy ground vehicles, aircraft, and chemical weapons. In a world otherwise trapped in medieval stasis, the Great Gummis seem to have mastered Clock Punk.
• The Avatar: The Last Airbender universe plays around with this trope in many ways.
  • Avatar: The Last Airbender:
    • In the flashbacks of Aang's three previous lives, which seems to span somewhere on the order of three or four hundred years, most of the world seems to have changed very little (Aang's outdated knowledge of slang aside). Even the Fire Nation, the setting's sole industrialized country, isn't completely immune; its ironclad steamships seen during the bulk of the series are virtually indistinguishable from the ones seen in flashbacks taking place one hundred years ago.
    • We see some technological innovation over the course of the war (and the art book states that Zuko's own ship is quite old compared with the current Fire Nation standard), but the overall developmental pace over those hundred years still seems quite slow considering that the Fire Nation already had a 19th-century Steampunk level of technology; you'd expect the war to have accelerated the technological development of it and its opponents. Heck, even the innovations we do see were mostly created by just one inventor towards the end of the war. It's occasionally inverted in spectacular fashion; they went from capturing the burned-out wreckage of said inventor's prototype hot air balloon to deploying an entire fleet of massive battle zeppelines in a matter of months.
    • Even if technology has been slow to change, culture has evolved over time. The Sun Warriors were apparently precursors to the present-day Fire Nation and had similar but different architectural styles and a very different perception of fire. The Fire Nation itself used to be a theocracy ruled by the head Fire Sage until one of those Fire Lords became the start of a monarchy. In Kyoshi's time the Earth Kingdom was apparently a collection of warring states with little respect for the Earth King in Ba Sing Se; even in Aang's time another city, Omashu, has its own king, and Kuei isn't particularly considered outside of his own city, whereas in Korra's time the monarch has enough power that her death destabilizes the entire continent. Before Kuruk's time, the Water Tribe was united in the north, then the Southern tribe seceded and built its own culture. The culture that seems to have changed least is the Air Nomads, who are clearly recognizable in Wan's time, even having similar tattoos. Given their Avatar statues they might have a collective interest in preserving and maintaining their history and way of life.
• Jackie Chan Adventures: In the two-part episode "Demon World", Shendu rewrites history so that he and his demon siblings rule the Earth and ensures that human technology never advanced past ancient/medieval levels. He also forbids humans from learning magic or martial arts.
  • Averted in Sequel Series The Legend of Korra to the point of becoming an inversion, which takes place in the setting's equivalent of The Roaring '20s. In the seventy-odd years between the series, not only has the entire world basically gone through the Second Industrial Revolution, but cars and radios have become quite common, and the first airplanes and films are already in production (faster than the actual real-life progression of such technology). Heck, they're even beyond real life at this point, with fully functional Mini-Mecha!
    • The flashbacks to Avatar Wan's time 10,000 years ago show a world that is clearly different from the world in both Aang's and Korra's time, but less different than would be expected for a 10,000-year gap.
    • Korra averts the trope not only in terms of simple technology, but it also goes to great lengths to show cultural change. The reformed Air Nation, being formed from people from several different nations who joined at various ages, are shown as being far less monastic than their Air Nomad predecessors, and much more active in world affairs. Also, head-shaving is far less common, and modern Airbenders have replaced their traditional clothes and glider staffs with wingsuits developed by Future Industries.
• A section of the Ghost Zone in Danny Phantom plays this trope quite straight. Not only is it a Medieval society set seemingly in the Dark Ages, but it is surrounded by a layer of black clouds and all time literally stands still, along with technology failing to work.
• Futurama:
  • Parodied when the professor, Fry, and Bender travel in a forward only Time Machine and see epochs of human evolution, which at one point reverts back to middle age castles and knights wielding swords and riding birds.
  • The series itself could count in a strange way. Due to many alien invasions, robot rebellions, wars with carrots, and brutal dictatorships, Earth has had many years of technological stagnation, and they still use the same technologies for over a thousand years (such as the suicide booths that advertise their use since 2008).
• Mysticons shows what happens when this is Averted, resulting in lots of Magitek and skyscrapers alongside elves, dwarves, and the undead.
• Subverted in ThunderCats (2011). While the Thundercats' society has remained in medieval stasis at a level around that of the dark ages or The Lord of the Rings, the opening has the Lizards suddenly attack with Giant Robots, Missiles, and laser guns. It's a massive Curb-Stomp Battle for the heroes, and Thundera (the homeland of the Thundercats) is wiped out in less than a day.
• Most versions of The Transformers take this to the extreme of nothing much changing over millions of years. Semi-justified in that the characters are extremely long-lived, so the generational turnover that drives change in real life scarcely exists for them.
• In Trollz, Simon invokes this in the time travel arc. He sends Trollzopolis to the Middle Ages and plans to make sure it stays that way.

Real Life

• Ultimately averted one way or another in the general sense. Every era and location on Earth has been home to some scientific, legal, or social innovation however small. Even societies that actively attempted to invoke this trope never succeeded in doing much more than greatly slowing innovation and even then only regionally and not for very long.
• Also averted in Real Life medieval times; the people of the Middle Ages certainly didn't think of themselves as living in stasis (or, indeed, in the 'middle' of anything). The Middle Ages saw a great deal of technological innovation. To name a few, the windmill, spectacles, sophisticated armour, three-crop rotation, the mechanical clock, gunpowder, and the flying buttress all were medieval inventions.
  • During the Middle Ages art and architecture evolved from a Late Roman style to Romanesque to Gothic. By the High Middle Ages, fashion and design was very distinct from what was present after the Fall of Rome. For instance, Constantinople's Hagia Sophia was created in a revolutionary new architecture style, only sixty years after the Fall of Rome.
  • However people in the Middle Ages also had a skewed view of the past; for example, many Roman and Greek myths survived and were expanded upon, but with knights and castles added in. Similarly, Medieval literature often portrays mythological and historical figures as following a weird hybrid of Christianity and the Greek/Roman Pantheon. And in some of the Baltic states (which remained the most primitive region of Europe until the Teutonic Knights forcibly modernized the place), the old Norse and/or Slavic gods were still worshiped until the last medieval centuries, meaning that most of these countries were Catholic for only a few hundred years before Protestantism or Orthodoxy swept in. For all intents and purposes, they thought the world had been as it was then since civilization picked up.
  • Medieval art was an inversion. Later Medieval paintings of great battles such as the siege of Jerusalem in the First Crusade would often depict the armies in whatever the latest, most fashionable, and most advanced armor of the painter's time, leading to paintings of early Crusaders dressed in full plate mail armor instead of cloth and chainmail. Even early events, such as a painting from 1470 CE of the Siege of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar (a battle which took place in 587 BCE) showed the fighters dressed as knights riding on horses with full plate armor and lances.
  • This is also why the popular images of Jesus, the saints, and many angels look suspiciously like Renaissance-era Italians both physically and in how they are dressed.
  • Both may have an explanation other than the author's own ignorance, specially in the case of religious paintings which were intended for "mass consumption" in churches (and not to sit in modern museums, as any guide will remind you). The paintings weren't there to look pretty, but to help parishioners visualize and memorize biblical stories and saints' lives. This was easier and required fewer explanations if the characters in them dressed and looked like the viewers. This practice continued well after the Renaissance, as missionaries in other continents would represent the people of the Nativity scene in the local clothes and skin color despite this being obviously impossible. Colonial Peruvian art includes roasted guinea pigs in the Last Supper and gives the archangel Michael a gun instead of a sword, for instance. This is because Peruvians were more familiar with the former: swords were not used in the Inca Empire, and the typical Medieval sword was in decline in Europe when the Spanish conquest happened.
  • Contrary to popular belief, the prevalence of firearms did not immediately invalidate armored knights — the two coexisted in Europe for about three centuries, with knights' armor receiving many adjustments over that time to make it more resistant to bullets (many pieces of armor would, in fact, have "proof marks" on them, to show that the armor could withstand a bullet.) The decline of armored knights, though it's hard to pinpoint to any one thing, coincides with technological improvements to cannons in particular around the 16th century — cannons became much more reliable and much less likely to kill the people firing them, which made them a more effective counter to armor that bullets would just bounce off of. As firearms further improved, body armor would almost completely fall out of favor until around the 20th century, where technological improvements would enable it to better withstand the small-arms weapons that had become much more prevalent while still being light and mobile enough to be practical for soldiers to wear regularly on the battlefield.
• From the perspective of the longue durée, one can actually see the true medieval stasis to be... The Roman Republic and The Roman Empire. Sort of. For all its status in the early modern, enlightened and romantic imaginary as a modernizing and civilizing force in Europe, there was a relatively limited degree of innovation (though far from non-existent).
  • Many of the great achievements of the Ancient World in mathematics and physics come from Egypt and Greece, and the Romans, as well as being brilliant engineers, were technological packrats who never met a good idea they didn't want to copy. Furthermore, just as there was both a fascination with Greece and the Middle East, and Egypt, there was also a significant degree of xenophobic cultural conservatism throughout Roman history, that liked to either sneer at foreign ideas or look suspiciously at innovation - meaning that there was an inclination to disavow change in written sources or pretend it wasn't happening. Octavian a.k.a. Caesar Augustus taking the title of Princeps was done with the intention of invoking the Just the First Citizen trope, because Rome had a deeply embedded cultural horror of Kings going back around 500 years, and even many of the later emperors took care to at least give the impression that they were consulting the Senate. Likewise, Julius Caesar partially justified his campaigns against the Gauls based on a perceived threat, related to their sacking of Rome nearly 350 years earlier.
  • However, it's worth noting that this is also more complicated than it seems. While the Romans were excellent at mimicking good foreign ideas and both adapting them and improving upon them, they weren't shy of inventing in their own right. The Othe Wiki has a full list, but inventions include: the codex (direct ancestor of the modern book), multiple varieties of dam used to this day, dental fillings, glass blowing, monumental domes, hydraulic mining, hypocausts (proto-floor heating), lighthouses, tanning leather (sort of - it was pre-Roman, but they industrialised it and spread it), permanent bridges, even a proto newspaper in the Acta Diurna.
  • The Romans were however great innovators when it came to legal matters. Many modern concepts of citizenship, republican government, individual rights of citizens, and even what it means to be a state were originally codified by statesmen trying to resolve the various social conflicts of the Roman state. There's a reason that Latin is to Lawyers what Greek is to Scientists.
  • The stasis of Imperial Rome can be compared to that of Imperial China, despite the apparent contradiction that many technological inventions happened there first. It wasn't unusual for those same technologies and other things like philosophy, medicine, bureaucracy, or military doctrine to remain unchanged for hundreds of years after being adopted, or even millennia. China was so sure of its own superiority historically, that it was extremely reluctant to adopt the ways of foreigners (a.k.a "barbarians") until the Opium Wars showed them why they should.
• Earth — Industrial technology has existed for at least 2500 years going back to Ancient Greece, but it wasn't till the end of the eighteenth century that one small, damp little island in the corner of Eurasia decided to do something with it.
  • The Antikythera Mechanism is a good example of this.
    • The kicking off of an industrial revolution requires several complex factors, none of which Ancient Greece had. To begin with, the place has to have basic law and order. It also has to make economic sense for people to invest in tools and machines to do things rather than just hiring (more) people and animals. Furthermore, people have to be able to get money to pay all these tools and machines — which means (easy-to-obtain) loans and institutions which can issue them at reasonable rates of interest. And that's just for efficient arable-farming, never mind the intricacies of manufacturing industries.
• The political, social, and technological organization of Japan remained the same from 1600 to 1853 — while the rest of the world changed — but this was mostly intentional, due to legally enforced restrictions (known in Japanese as the Sakoku or 'closed-nation' policy, though the term has fallen out of use in favour of 'isolationism'). The basic structure of Japanese society and state remained largely unchanged through the Feudal period, 1185-1868, though the 'warring states' period that immediately preceded the rise of the Tokugawa Shogunate saw a lot of (upward) social mobility.
  • By the time Commodore Perry arrived off what is now Tokyo Bay in 1853 however, there were at least a handful of changes from the days of Tokugawa Ieyasu. The Samurai in general had long turned into a landed peacetime caste, though their place in society was gradually being challenged by the merchant classes. With the exception of fringe and particularly stubborn clans, most were either allied to or puppets of the Shogunate. A fair bit of knowledge of the outside world filtered through the Ryukyus (that was technically an independent country^note The Ryukyu Kingdom was officially a vassal state of the Ming Dynasty of China and later the Qing Dynasty, that Japan did not want to provoke. When the Japanese Satsuma Domain invaded in 1609, the Qing Dynasty preparing a relief force was enough to get them to restore formal independence but kept secretly controlling the Ryukyu Kingdom until the Meiji Restoration saw their formal annexation to Japan, leaving the Ryukyuans free to adopt outsider knowledge) Tsushima, and the isle of Dejima (modern medicine and science being called "Dutch studies/learning", acquired as it was from contact with the Dutch trading post confined to Dejima Island in Nagasaki). This meant that while the Japanese didn't have the technology that showed up on their doorstep (i.e. the "Black Ships"), they knew enough for the better-informed among them to figure out just how far behind they were falling in the seventeenth and eighteenth century.
    • During the mid-sixteenth century the Japanese got a hold of two Portuguese matchlock muskets and quickly figured out how to both mass produce them (it's estimated that pre-Tokugawa Japan had more firearms than existed in all of late-16th century Europe) and use them effectively in battle far before Europeans ever did. Unfortunately, they never improved on the design and when Europeans and Americans showed up in the mid-19th century with far more modern weapons, the Japanese were hopelessly outclassed.
• The Amish deliberately shun most or all kinds of new technology due to religious beliefs and enforcing a strong belief in hard work as rewarding, instead electing to live a life that is not very different from the lives of those who lived around the 18th century or before that, on the whole. They do have contact with modern society, and some do use modern technology like tractors, but they mostly aim to be self-reliant and any use of modern technology is rare at best.
  • This will occasionally move into Schizo Tech territory, with motorized farm machinery mounted on a wooden platform and pulled by horses or sewing machines which are powered by a foot-operated treadle and controlled by mechanically linked dials and switches.
  • The Amish value group effort when determining whether to use or avoid a piece of technology. Families are discouraged from using mechanical farming equipment in order to motivate them to work together in order to accomplish a harvest. In one case, a governing council actually commanded an elderly Amish farmer to purchase a tractor as his sons had moved out and he could no longer accomplish his harvest. The idea is that relying on the community discourages vanity and other sins.
  • The Amish will use technology when required by the law — modern pasteurization for dairy products was the first example of this. Likewise, if you hire Amish for construction work and ask them to use power tools or supply them, they will use them without considering it a "sin."
    • Amish and similar groups are survivalists who don't want to be dependent on other people. They simply don't use technology they can't reproduce themselves but doing a job for someone else does not contradict this rule.
  • Interestingly, while a lot of people may be opposed to genetically modified food, the Amish love the idea of disease-resistant crops and eagerly grow them.
  • And while the Amish may not use nor closely follow the latest in technology, they're hardly ignorant about it. They know what computers are and have a grasp of what sort of things they do — if an Amish person is injured and an ambulance takes them to a hospital, they will hardly be confused and think there's magic at work — they won't gasp in shock at a person's cellphone.
    • Children raised as Amish are actually expected to spend a few months living in the modern world upon reaching adulthood so that if they do decide to commit to the Amish lifestyle, it's an informed choice.
    • There is an Amish-run ice cream shop equipped to take not just credit and debit cards, but app-based payment methods like Apple Pay and Venmo.
  • Some Amish have started using solar panels in order to have electricity without needing to abandon their self-reliance.
  • With the popularity of Amish furniture as being extremely well-crafted and durable, a few Amish businesses have devised absurdly clever "no-tech" ways to shuttle the one telephone they have between everyone in the building to handle business calls.
• Believers in the Phantom Time conspiracy theory argue (among other things) that little to no architectural evolution happened between the years 614 to 911 and take that as evidence that those years of European history are in fact fictitious and the work of Holy Roman Emperor Otto III, who wanted to be crowned around the year 1000, despite it only being the year 703.
  • There are many reasons why the PTH is ridiculous, not the least the fact that this supposedly "unchanged" intermediate time saw the rise and expansion of Islam, the Islamic Golden Age, the entire history of the Carolingian Empire and its own (Carolingian) Renaissance, and the birth of the Papacy as a political power, among others.
• We all do this from a psychological standpoint in our heads. It's why we are always so surprised upon returning to our "old neighborhood where nothing ever changed" and finding trees cut down or grown larger, neighbors having moved on or passed away, houses painted differently, etc. It's not that we don't expect things to change, it's just that the human brain isn't usually thinking about how things may be changing back in or old neighborhood as we move on-we're just busy with our lives where we live now, and so our memory of our old neighborhood goes into a medieval stasis of sorts.
• The first thing a student of any discipline dealing with the past should learn, be it History, Archaeology, or Paleontology, is that people have a natural tendency to see "the past" as simpler and shorter than it was. Just look at pages like Anachronism Stew, Older Than They Think, Newer Than They Think, and Briefer Than They Think.
• There are, even today, a number of isolated societies that have never gone beyond a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, for the simple reason that the regions they live in lack native animal and plant species that can easily be domesticated in order to facilitate a shift to herding or agriculture and in most cases those areas are also not conductive of farming or herding anyway due to lack of rainfall or other factors (which is why some other group that did practice herding or agriculture never bothered to come and take the land).
• During the union times, and before modern communication and roads, Norway came out as incredibly stable. Firearms aside, the farmlands continued to work out things after medieval fashion for centuries. Thus, iron age attitudes lasted among them all the way to 1830. In some remote areas, a proper country road or a railway was the changing factor. Natural household, as opposed to money household, was the rule rather than not in the period, as were the use of the old norse thing to settle disputes.
• For the overwhelming majority of human existence, as "modern humans" and before, humanity used stone tools. Copper, bronze, iron, steel, and more advanced technologies came in "the last 5 minutes" or so of our species' "technological clock".
  • The trope Humans Advance Swiftly is very much Truth in Television. Before the "mental revolution" in African Homo sapiens about 70,000 years ago, it was the norm for lithic industries to remain unchanged for hundreds of thousands of years, even as their makers evolved into completely new biological species. This was mostly because technological advancement bases itself on the passing-down of information, so that they can be remembered and improved upon with time. As one can imagine, trying to advance technology is very difficult without any sort of written knowledge and having little-to-no verbal language, forcing humans to start at square one with each generation.
  • Oldowan or "Mode I" tools were used both by Homo habilis, who was little more than a glorified Australopithecus, and the much more human-like H. ergaster in Africa and H. erectus in Eurasia. They appeared 2.6 million years ago and were phased out 1.7 million years ago, 900,000 years later.
  • Acheulean or "Mode II" tools were used from 1.7 million years ago to only 130,000 years ago in Africa. This makes its main development, the hand-axe, the longest-used tool in all of human history.
  • Mousterian or "Mode III" tools were used by the Neanderthals of Europe from 160,000 to 40,000 years ago. A brief, enigmatic new technology known as Chatelperronian (45,000 — 40,000 years ago) has been interpreted as Neanderthal attempts to imitate the Aurignacian or "Mode IV" used by newly arrived H. sapiens. If true, this means Neanderthals were smart enough to realize their technology was outclassed upon meeting H. sapiens, yet it didn't occur to them to improve on their technology before that.
• Ants and termites, specifically the ones that farm fungus, are an example. They are similar to neolithic humans in regards to agriculture and having sedentary societies (though they lack livestock and tool use), but while humans only spent nine thousand years in the Neolithic before reaching the Bronze Age, leafcutter ants have contently remained in a state comparable to the former for at least fifty-five million, and termites at least twenty-five. The reasons for this is are a lack of agriculture, similar to the cause of the aforementioned slow development of early humans, lack of a food surplus, and the lack of domesticated animals, and the fact that while they do have agriculture, they lack tool use (mostly due to their small size and lack of need to do so, though there are other species that do use pebbles) and domesticated animals that humans had (due to being so adapted to their fungus that they lack the ability to eat anything else).
• Finland was hit with this after being conquered by Russia. Alexander I allowed autonomy to Finland, but every change had to be approved by him. After the Diet of Porvoo Finland remained in the 18th century for fifty years.
• This trope is played straight in a sense that some societies and cultures advanced faster in technology and civilization than others. While the less technologically advanced cultures of the world can still adapt and grow, they have been overshadowed by any rising power that adapts faster (European barbarians being conquered by Rome, the Muslims rapidly taking large parts of the Middle East, the Europeans dominating the people of the New World). Currently, the USA, Western Europe and East Asia dominate the planet on many levels, technological, economic, and political. Meanwhile, there are still places like Subsaharan Africa and Southeast Asia that still rely on sustinence farming, and even hunter-gatherers in the deep parts of the Amazon. While this doesn't make those cultures inferior in any way, it does put their populations at a technological disadvantage.
  • One prominent example is the people of North Sentinel Island, located in the Bay of Bengal. Despite being very close to the South Asian power of India, they are still hunter-gatherers in the modern age, isolated from the world for thousands of years with little (if any at all) technological development. The other inhabitants of the Andaman Islands, including the Onge and Andamanese, have adopted modern clothing and maintain relations with the mainland, which makes this case even more severe. After an incident where a Christian missionary was killed by the Sentinelese, India law prohibits any travel to the island.

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