Country of Hats

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

So you have yourself a good idea for a story: A Badass Crew from Not-Europe -- the land of humans -- Walking the Earth on their Cool Boat. "To explore strange new lands, seeking out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before!"

Wait... that sounds like a plot you'd use for a Science Fiction Series, but no, you can't have that! Your story is a Heroic Fantasy and there are no aliens in your setting! So what do your characters meet in the story?

Well, quirky tribesmen, of course! But wait, that would grow old pretty quick. You can't just have them meet only tribesmen. So make them somehow come across Gimmicky Towns. Then it hit you. How about gimmicky countries?

There's the Sci Fi Planet of Hats but that applies to homogeneous planets (or just species); and Gang of Hats is just a small group (heterogeneous or otherwise) with one defining quirk. So what do you use?

Enter the Country of Hats: a nation with exactly one defining trait. Regardless of the size of the country or the diversity of its population, everyone in it has exactly the same focus and purpose. Perhaps they're all Exclusively Evil and every kind of advancement -- grade school, job, government, military -- is handled by Klingon Promotion. Or perhaps everyone from the babies to the grandpas are vegetarians who apply New Age philosophies to everything in life. Or every last one of them is a Mad Scientist. And there's no cases of Klingon Scientists Get No Respect, because it never occurs to anyone to even be something different from the national Hat.

(How their economies and other vital systems that require other Hats to function actually do so is probably best ignored. Or perhaps explored and taken to ridiculous extremes.)

Country of Hats is a Sister Trope to National Stereotypes; the two are fun house mirrors of each other. National Stereotypes is when a diverse nation or culture is perceived and/or treated by outsiders as a Country of Hats. Country of Hats, on the other hand, is when the only thing the country has is a national stereotype, but they don't realize it and somehow manage to have a seeingly-functioning nation anyway.

Sub-Trope of Planet of Hats. Compare Gang of Hats. Not to be confused with Country of the Blind.

Examples of Country of Hats include:

Anime and Manga

  • In Kino's Journey, each individual country has its own Hat, such as a country devoted to nothing else but the construction of a tower or is inhabited by people who do nothing but secretarial work. Most amusing is the town that doesn't have a Hat, and is trying desperately to get one. They show off some different "ancient tradition" to every traveler to come by. Kino remarks that this is their Hat.
  • Maquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms: The Iolph, Maquia's people, are long-lived weavers.

Comic Books

  • The Polish comic Tytus Romek IA Tomek has an issue where the protagonists visit several "Nonsense Islands", each of which is a classic Island Of Hats where everyone is an athlete, a bureaucrat, etc.

Film

  • Subversion: this initially seems to be the case with Vulgaria and child-hating in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, but it turns out to be a hat recently forced upon the collective unwilling heads of the Vulgarians by their neurotic baroness.

Literature

  • Older Than Feudalism: This happens in the ancient Greek tales of Hyperborea, Atlantis, and other allegorically intended foreign lands. Nations characterized by a single trait have been a staple of travelogue-style fiction for centuries.
  • The floating island of Laputa from Gulliver's Travels, where everyone is a lunatic researcher trying to accomplish something nonsensical or impossible. So written by Jonathan Swift to satirize what he thought of scientific thought in its early days.
  • The Wheel of Time
    • The world is comprised of hat-wearing nations and peoples. Two Rivers folk are all brave and stubborn, Cairhienin are all short and concerned with political intrigue, Arad Domani women are all sluts, etc. Few cultures in the series are shown to have individuals who behave contrary to their cultural stereotypes.
    • Women in the various Ajahs of the Aes Sedai almost always act alike, but membership in a Ajah is a matter of outlook and self-chosen duties..
    • The Myrddraal, Black Cloaked Elite Mooks and Mook Lieutenants, are said to be essentially an entire race of the same person replicated over and over again. However, the Myrddraal are an artificial race and all behave the same because they're wired to.
  • The Belgariad series of novels by David Eddings:
    • Each of the nations of the West has its own hat. To a first approximation, based on the characters encountered: All Sendars are farmers, all Drasnians are spies, all Tolnedrans are merchants, all Chereks are Viking warriors, and all Nyssans are drug-addicted poisoners.
    • Most of the 'hats' are actually fantasy archetypes based on Earth cultures—the Chereks are Vikings Up to Eleven, the Algars are the Mongols likewise, the Drasnians appear to be a Renaissance Italy stereotype transplanted into a different geographical setting, the Tolnedrans are based on the Roman Empire (hence both their mercantile aspect and their obsessive road-building and disciplined legions), the Arends are medieval high chivalry myths taken to the point of self-parody, etc. The unflappable demeanour, their courtesy, and the general obsession with propriety of the Sendars seem to be more English than anything.
    • The Eastern nations started out as pretty hatty. But then, they were under the control of an insane god for millenia. Eddings recycles revisits recycles those themes in the Elenium and Tamuli novels: All Styrics are self-pitying magicians, all Atans are warriors, All Tamuli are polite to a fault, etc.
    • The tribes of Angarak originally were the CASTES of Angarak, and Torak mistook their differences for tribal rather than professional distinctions after being away doing god-stuff for a couple thousand years.
  • Chronicles of Thomas Covenant
    • The Haruchai are a race of stoic proud warriors. The Insequent are a race who Walk the Earth in search of knowledge. The Elohim wear an Omniscient Morality License hat. All the Ramen (people from the Plains of Ra, not noodles) care about are their horses. The Stonedownors are obsessed with stone while their cousins the Woodhelvins are obsessed with trees.
    • And on the evil side of things, the Cavewights are all Axe Crazy mooks, the ur-viles are Enigmatic Minion sorcerers, and the Croyel are parasites who offer faustian bargains. Ravers could also be said to have the hat of nature-hating omnicidal jerkasses, but this is justified by there being only three of them, and the fact that they work directly for the God of Evil.
  • Walter Moers in his Zamonia novels applies the principle to several cities, most notably Bookholm (everything revolves around books) and Sledwaya (everything revolves around illness)
  • In the Shadowleague books each of the different realms has its own hat: Callisoria, for example, is the land where everyone blindly follows the Corrupt Church, and Ghariad is the land full of humanoid monsters who drink human blood.
  • Garth Nix's Old Kingdom series isn't too bad about this, for a fantasy story—Ancelstierre's hat is being early 20th century England, and the Old Kingdom's hat is being a fantasy country with a distinctive magic system and a serious zombie problem. Considerable variation within. And then in Abhorsen we get the Southerlings, refugees from a war in the South whose real purpose is to be killed by the Big Bad and turned into its zombie slaves. They barely say a word. They are identified by their blue hats. Repeatedly.
    • Presumably Nix wanted a cultural trait to identify the doomed-people-and-zombies with, since a phenotypic one would be like marking out whatever real race has that characteristic as Cannon Fodder and/or things to run away from. And since particular hats have frequently been the intentional markers of communities throughout history (most of Eurasia has for extended periods viewed the lack of a hat as indecent) blue headwear was a solid call.
  • A Song of Ice and Fire features several peoples that take one particular thing, usually an important resource or terrain feature, and make it the absolute center of their culture, shoehorning it into their language's figures of speech wherever possible:
    • The Dothraki: horses
    • The Lamb-men: sheep
    • The Vale: heights
    • The Iron Islands: iron
    • Braavos: water
    • Asshai (and the Targaryens): fire

Tabletop Games

  • 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons splits the old traits of the elf race into two new races called "elves" and "eladrin". Because, you know, you can't have a single species wearing the intellectual hat and the close-to-nature hat at the same time.
  • In GURPS Fantasy 2: The Madlands, there is the region of Savringia. Thousands of years previously, two godlike entities decided to have a contest to see which one could create the most unlikely society. So they reduced themselves to energy and used that to create City-states of Hats. Currently there are about 30 but this is subject to change. There are the more ordinary Cities of Merchants, Tradesmen, and Priests, but there are also esoteric ones like Cities of Judges, Spiders, Grays, Silence, and the Fickle.
  • Warhammer Fantasy Battle have geographical boundaries or other distinctions that can dictate the headgear of the resident:
    • Empire
      • All Marienbugers are foppish, arrogant but irritatingly skilled dandies.
      • Everyone from Nuln is an engineer reeking of blackpowder.
      • All Reiklanders are skilled marksmen and consummate professional soldiers.
      • All Middenlander are hairy barbarians with a liking for blunt weapons.
      • Hochlanders are accomplished hunters and crack shots with hunting rifles and longbows.
    • Skaven - originally there were four five defined major clans: Skryre, the crazy techo-magical inventors; Moulder, the insane fleshcrafting breeders of monsters; Eshin, the cloaked espionage and assassination division; Pestilens, the gibbering worshipers of plague and decay; Mors, the now extremely powerful martial clan. A recent book on heraldry introduced scores of minor clans, each their their own (slightly smaller) hat.
    • Vampire Counts - Each Vampire Count will be from one of several bloodlines: Von Carstein (classic Dracula-style vampires, although recently have been modeled to be a lot more bestial), Lahmians (pseudo-Egyptian female vampires. With cats), Blood Dragons (honour-bound martial powerhouses who exist only for combat and proving themselves), Strigoi (horribly deformed ghouls with no link to their humanity at all) and Necrarchs (Nosferatu-like intellectuals who are wizened but terrifyingly powerful when it comes to magic).
  • Shadowrun 3rd edition features a section with members of each of the Five Races giving you a brief introduction to their race. Most of them start by acknowledging their race's hat, then going on to tear it apart as racist bullcrap. Except the dwarf, since their hat is being short.
    • Dwarves also have a hat of being technical wizkids. The dwarf explaining this has trouble working out how to fix a toaster.
      • Shadowrun does a good job of deconstructing the hats/stereotypes for each race. For instance, the dwarf states that a lot of dwarves live underground because basement apartments are cheaper and they don't mind the low ceilings. Amusingly enough, the human points out how he's different from the other races by mentioning the other races' hats and stating how Humans don't have any of those.
  • Nearly every race and culture in Talislanta wears a hat to some degree or another: Sarista are Lovable Rogues, Danuvians are Action Girls and Non Action Guys, Muses are Cloudcuckoolanders, Yassan are Gadgeteer Geniuses, Jaka are hunters, and so on. The Gao are a notable exception...but that's because Gao-Din is less a culture proper than a mixed bag.

Video Games

  • The world of Loom is divided into xenophobic guilds, each with a specific craft, e.g. Weavers, Glassmakers, etc. Each guild's citizens seem to all bear the characteristics of their guild. For instance, the glassmakers value traits such as clarity and beauty, and have names like Luscent Bottleblower. Somewhat justified in that the thing that defines them is what their community was formed on in the first place.
  • Gilneas in World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, even before worgen curse, seems to be a literal Nation of Hats. As far as you can see, everyone in the starting zone wears some kind of hat. And not just any hats, but nice hats!
    • Warcraft 2 had several examples of this trope among the human nations and orcish clans. Dalaran was all mages, Kul'Tiras was all sailors, Stromgarde was all warriors, Alterac was all snobs. The Twilight's Hammer was all end of the world cultists, the Stormreavers were all warlocks, Laughing Skull were all backstabbing traitors, Warsong could all do earsplitting battlecries, Bonechewers were all cannibals. In World of Warcraft, dwarves continue to fit this loosely. Ironforge dwarves are mostly smiths and disciplined warriors, Wildhammers are nature loving barbarians, and Dark Irons are all sneaky spies, thieves, assassins, and pyromaniacs.
    • Cataclysm has provided many races a chance to get new hats. Night elves can now be magi, something that was long forbidden in their culture. Dwarves can now be shamans, providing stark contrast to their otherwise industrial nature (at least of the Bronzebeard variety). Orcs are seriously divided over whether or not Garrosh Hellscream is a good leader—even though the should fully embrace a blood-and-thunder warrior. There is still a tremendous amount of hat wearing though, and while not all races have true hats, they have collective niches, which both the Horde and the Alliance forming parts of Six Race gang.

Western Animation

  • One episode of Veggie Tales had two feuding Towns of Hats used for their Good Samaritan retelling. One town wore shoes and boots on their heads, and the other wore pots. The purpose was to show how people are divided by trivial differences, a rare acknowledgment of the silliness of Planets of Hats.
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