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{{trope}}
[[File:
{{quote|'''Not Invented Here:''' ''Trade of technology will not exist. One place in the world will have all the techno-gadgets while all the others will be harvesting dirt.''
|''[[The Grand List of Console Role Playing Game Cliches]]'' }}
▲{{quote|'''Not Invented Here:''' ''Trade of technology will not exist. One place in the world will have all the techno-gadgets while all the others will be harvesting dirt.''|''[[The Grand List of Console Role Playing Game Cliches]]'' }}
▲A large-scale form of [[Schizo Tech]].
Every country is different thanks to culture and geography, and no two cities in any one country are alike either. However some worlds can take this to extremes, making two side by side cities as different as night and day. The differences can be purely cosmetic or go all the way to lifestyle, architecture, and even technology. You can have a [[Utopia]] city made of [[Crystal Spires and Togas]] sitting smack dab next to a ghetto...sorry, "quaint hamlet" that [[Medieval Stasis|never left]] [[The Middle Ages]].
The reason, if any is given, is that there's no technology trade between the countries, so any discoveries a country makes (from Agriculture to Zoology) never leave it. Other times it's a question of societal values, where the "savage" village has chosen not to develop technology in favor of peaceful agrarian lives; however you can expect them to have copious and advanced magic if it's a [[Magic Versus Science]] setting. It's almost never purely stylistic, like [[Batman|Gotham City]] and [[Superman|Metropolis]]. Both exist in the same year and country, but one is firmly entrenched in 1920's Gothic and Noir style, while the other is an Art Deco optimistic future.
More plausible is [[Used Future]], where one area is able to maintain a relative level of sophistication [[After the End|After]] or [[Just Before the End]] where others are reduced to tent villages. In these cases, advanced technology is ''known of'' by most, but becomes uncommon away from the advanced areas.
See also: [[Crystal Spires and Togas]], [[Advanced Ancient Acropolis]] and [[Ludd Was Right]]. Compare [[Low Culture, High Tech]], where a backwards culture uses technology it doesn't understand.
{{examples|Examples:}}▼
== Anime
* In ''Windaria'', the coastal city-state of Itha runs on windmills and admittedly sophisticated dams and waterwheels, and its military has hot-air balloons, crossbows, Molotov cocktails, and some kind of unarmoured hovercraft. The nearby mountain kingdom of Paro is a dieselpunk dystopia with monoplanes, assault rifles, and tanks. Somehow they fight a war on equal terms.
* In ''[[Kino's Journey]]'', cities are separated by great distances and form separate countries. Also, travel is dangerous and most people never leave their hometowns. Thus, there are vast differences in technology and culture between cities, which vary from medieval to futuristic in nature. This is made even stranger by the [[Schizo
* In ''[[
== Comic Books ==
* Gotham city and Metropolis both reflect the style of their hero: Dark for [[
** Mind you, there is some overlap. For instance, Metropolis has a rough area called Suicide Slum where a few street level superheroes keep themselves busy with small time crooks.
** Gotham also contains
*** In [[Batman:
* Gyro Gearloose makes this possible in the Scrooge McDuck universe. The comics are set in a vague, 1960s-esque world, but the [[Mad Scientist]] is able to bring any and all technology that would otherwise not be available for the stories.
** And this even applies when the comics are clearly set in the present, as they tend to be if not by [[Don Rosa]]. It would apply even if they were set in a realistic far future. Gyro Gearloose can create any kind of <s>plot device</s> invention with no regard to whether it's actually possible.
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==
* In ''[[
== Film ==
* The movie version of ''[[Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (
* ''[[Batman Begins]]'' is almost a carbon copy of the Philippines example under Real Life - glittering modern skyscrapers coupled with dark and steamy shanty towns/dirty back alleys in the same city. [[The Dark Knight|The sequel]] averts this somewhat {{spoiler|due to the slums being torn apart in throes of madness and essentially written off}}.
== Literature ==
* ''[[Oryx and Crake]]'' (by [[Margaret Atwood]]) is set somewhere late in the 21st century, and shows present day trends of inequality taken to the extreme. The privileged few live in gated communities in comfortable settings, the majority live in the "Pleeb Lands" which are disadvantaged, violent (or at least perceived by the privileged as such), drug fueled and dependent on mass-produced technology that trickles down from the upper echelon.
* In ''[[
* Invoked deliberately in ''[[The Ear, the Eye
* In ''[[
* In [[The Pendragon Adventures]], the Milago and Bedoowan live within spitting distance of each other: the Milago live in small huts and shit in holes in the ground, while the Bedoowan castle has running water and uses naturally glowing stones to provide artificial light.
* ''[[Wheel of Time]]'': implied in in Towers of Midnight, in
== Live Action TV ==
* ''[[Star Trek
* ''[[Buck Rogers in
== Tabletop Games ==
* The ''[[Warhammer Fantasy Battle]]'' fantasy setting has this big time with Bretonnia (read Medieval France in a fantasy setting) and [[The Empire]] (the Holy Roman Empire in a fantasy setting). Bretonnia is typical Medieval fantasy fodder with a feudal system, knights, archers, etc... The Empire, on the other hand, has Renaissance era level technology that borders on the early Industrial Revolution era level with elements of [[Steampunk]] thrown in for good measure; including things like steam-powered tanks, primitive machine guns, ironclad warships, flamethrowers, and a few other things as well. This can make for some interesting battles in the series.
** Of course, Bretonnia is [[Justified Trope|justified...]]
*** And not much justification is needed at that. Poland was still using what amounted to knights and irregular horse archers (admittedly supported by more modern contingents) by the mid 17th century. See the battle of Warsaw for a good example.
*** Well, it was a well-oiled fighting force, and usually matching their "more modern" opponents. And obviously, these opponents did not field clockwork horses or rocket artillery.
** The other races vary; the [[Our Dwarves Are All the Same|Dwarves]] are on about the same level as the Empire, but with more efficient technology, while the [[Rodents of Unusual Size|Skaven]] have even more advanced technology, [[Mad Scientist|but it doesn't work right very often]]. The rest of the factions are less technologically advanced to the point of making the Bretonnians look modern, but make up for it with [[Functional Magic|magic]] and natural strength.
* The [[
** ''[[Traveller]]'' does this too, but as an analogy of the [[Truth in Television]] example above: the low-tech worlds still have access to more advanced technology, but the local industrial base isn't equipped to produce it so it has to be imported at extra cost. It's a similar situation in ''[[Firefly]]'', which [[Word of God|was not]] inspired by ''[[Traveller]]'' but you'd be forgiven for thinking it was.
** In ''[[Warhammer
*** They actually stated in one ''White Dwarf'' that they'd created a fictional universe where you can have rock-waving barbarians and antigravity tanks on the same battlefield.
* ''[[Ravenloft]]'' can be bad for this, with domains ranging from the Classical Era to Psuedo-Victorian era. Granted it makes more sense when you realize each domain is snatched up from a different world, and some of the [[Dark Lord
** The Hollow World CD&D setting has a similar patchwork feel to it, for pretty much the same reason: it was designed by the Immortals to preserve favorite cultures which were dying out on the planet's surface, and they used really powerful magic to make sure these cultures [[Status Quo Is God|would neither mix nor change]].
* There's plenty of this in ''[[Rifts]]'', where a rural community with no technology to speak of ([[Schizo
** This tropes makes sense because travel on Rifts Earth is extremely dangerous. The vast majority of people from low tech/low magic communities never travel more than a mile or two from their home town. In a lot of cases, they probably don't even ''know'' there's a massive city full of magical and/or technological marvels only 50 miles away, and vice versa.
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** Of course, your own units can also get left behind technologically if you leave them, say, guarding a city or something, and never bother to upgrade them.
** Same with ''[[Rise of Nations]]''. It's not impossible to find yourself using missile cruisers to screen your battleships from incoming fireships. Or rolling out tanks to take down a band of hostile musketeers. Or even reacting to your opponent inventing the ''petrol engine'' with an atomic strike on his capital.
* The entire premise of ''[[Project Eden]]'' for the [[
* ''[[Arcanum:
* This is seen in many parts of the ''[[
** This is actually a ''major theme'' in the ''[[
* Subverted in ''[[Guild Wars]]'' in that the African Elona and Nordic Norns is actually just AS advanced as the south American-seeming Krytans and European Ascalonians. Same with the Asian Cantha, and some even have their own technologies similar to others.
** In the case of Elona, the designers specifically tried to imagine what the old north African empires would look like had they existed for another few hundred years, and had magic. The results were [http://www.guildwars.com/products/nightfall/gallery/wallpaper/gw-wp083.php fairly badass].
* Arguably the Mushroom Kingdom in the '[[Super Mario Bros.]]'' series. You've got towns and villages like Toad Town set firmly in the middle ages equivalent, then shiny futuristic cities like Mushroom City, Twilight City and various cities from the Wario series games with modern technology equivalents.
* Also, ''[[
* Played extremely straight in ''[[The Spirit Engine]]''. On one end of the country, you have Homestead, a very rural area stuck in [[Medieval Stasis]]. On the other end, you have Silthea, which has ''tanks, high-tech copters, sentient [[A Is]], military-grade robots and a hundred levels tall skyscraper''. Semi-justified in that the Frontier Corporation, which is responsible for pretty much 100% of technological progress, is seated in Silthea, employs all known scientists and doesn't care one whit for anywhere else. And that it's run by {{spoiler|a scientist who used to live in our world but was dimension-shifted due to an accident with a particle accelerator}}.
* The ''[[
** [[
* ''[[Final Fantasy X|FFX]]'' has an example fitting the page quote: You have one group of people, the Al Bhed, who take pride in salvaging and making use of the local [[Lost Technology]], while the rest of the world lives in small villages who actively shun such technology. Of course, this one's justified - the Al Bhed are the only ones who don't worship Yevon, and the Yevonite religion condemns technology {{spoiler|because Yu Yevon, the extremely angry entity who runs it, saw his country destroyed by it}}. After Yevon is dealt with, the sequel shows technology becoming increasingly wider-spread.
** Yu Yevon doesn't run anything, moreover Zanarkand - his home - was extremely technologically advanced except in it's military, where it relied more on summoners.
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* ''[[Jade Empire]]'' has a fairly extreme version, if believable. Towns out in the countryside look like ordinary ancient Chinese villages; at the [[Capital City]], though, everything is far more modern, down to having ''power lines''. Seems that the Empire [[Truth in Television|just doesn't care about its outer provinces]].
* The ''[[Sonic the Hedgehog]]'' series suffers from this. In ''Sonic Adventure 2'' the main city is clearly based on San Francisco with modern buildings and ordinary vehicles. Meanwhile in ''Sonic Heroes'' and ''Sonic Riders'' there are extremely futuricistic locales with flying cars, anti-gravity transporters, and buildings that'd look at home on [[Star Wars|Coruscant]]. And there's even tribal villages too. Whether the series is supposed to be set in the twentieth, twenty-first, or twenty-second century is a matter for debate, given that building a city-sized space station wasn't an obstacle 50 years before the series' present.
* In ''[[
* In ''The Lost Crown: A Ghost-Hunting Adventure'', many of the people and locations in Saxton seem stalled in some previous decade. Antique radios and a blacksmith's workshop exist side by side with interactive video exhibits at the museum and loudspeakers at the faire. While several of the people turn out {{spoiler|to be ghosts who don't realize they're dead}}, others' status is left ambiguous. [[Lampshaded]] when Nigel asks the barkeep what year it is, and never gets a straight answer.
* Used deliberately in ''[[Red Dead Redemption]]'', which is set in [[The Wild West]] - in [[The Edwardian Era]]. The final taming of the West and the death of the culture it supported are the game's primary theme.
* In ''[[Terranigma]]'', there ''is'' in fact tech sharing, but if you don't grow certain towns, you can end up with strange situations, like having the American town Freedom as a bustling metropolis, while certain European towns remain as rural as they were the day you freed them from their oppressive king. In addition, certain towns begin extremely differently. Apparently, at the same time you were helping Thomas Edison discover electric power, Japan and parts of China have had ''television'' for quite some time.
** Somewhat justified in that everything on Earth was destroyed and recreated, starting from the continents themselves from stored templates. It's possible China and Japan were stored as more advanced versions than Europe and America.
* In ''[[
* Though you never get to travel to Zzyzx in ''[[Rune Factory]]'' it maintains a presence in several of the games (especially the first) and is mentioned to be highly technologically advanced, even running an army of tanks against the town of Kardia, While all signs point to the fastest transport in Norad to be a horse drawn carriage. [[Word of God]] is that Zzyzx focused on technology while Norad focused on magic.
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== Real Life ==
* This is very much present in [[Real Life]]. In many developing countries, farming is still done with bulls, and muscle-powered rickshaws are still very much in use. Millions still die from diseases whose vaccines were invented a decades ago; there are millions in the corners of Africa and Asia who are still not connected with the electrical grid; there are tribes in dank jungles of the Amazon, Indonesia and Andaman Islands who still live as hunter gatherers.
** Interestingly, however, cell phones are literally ''everywhere''; portable technologies have lesser infrastructure requirements, leading to cases of farmers riding donkeys to the rice paddy while chatting on their cell phones. Phones and mobile internet are also used for bill payment and tracking crops in developing nations.
** One group of Andaman natives, the Sentinelese, actively ''refuse'' any contact with the outside world, even resorting to violence sometimes. Nowadays Indian authorities just leave them alone and look around so that everyone else does the same.
* During the Middle Ages, Constantinople embodied this trope (and to a lesser extent, the rest of the Byzantine Empire) with regards to Europe. At a time when Western Europe was still recovering from the fall of Rome and the resulting collapse of infrastructure, they had a teeming cosmopolitan city that maintained and improved on most of the old Roman building traditions. Add in fairly high literacy rates, a university system, a mature legal system, and a stable bureaucracy, and then compare it to just about any other European country at the time. Europe got better ''eventually'' - i.e. the mid-to-late late nineteenth century. By then, of course, Constantinople had long-since been raided by marauding crusaders and taken over by the Ottomans, under whom it continued to be rather well-kept relative to Europe until the 'Great Divergence' we mentioned earlier.
* People living in the deepest parts of the Amazon Rainforest, compared with those living in [
** Societies like the Amish (Pennsylvania Dutch for example) often do advance somewhat using imported equipment without sacrificing their core lifestyle. You get [[Schizo
*** Amish acceptance of technology is based on the effect it has on their community, particularly if the device would prevent them from being self-sufficient. Running a compressor using purchased fuel and using air power (aka "Amish Electricity") for appliances is fine, but paying a monthly bill for electricity is not. Some tech like solar panels and pay-as-you-go cell phones are accepted on these grounds, while many Amish are happy to pay for a ride to work in a car.
** Another rather blatant example is the differences between South Korea and its neighbor North Korea. North Korea is sandwiched between South Korea and China, two industrial nations with healthy economies. In comparison, North Korea has literally zero electricity usage and infrastructure, and outside the capital, you'll only find farmland and military bases. To put things in perspective, [http://tizona.files.wordpress.com/2008/03/north-korea-is-dark.jpg this is what North Korea looks like at night compared to its wealthier neighbors].
* [http://www.snopes.com/photos/architecture/detroit.asp This] image of Makati,
* [[Inverted Trope|Inversion]] along the US-Mexico border; the US side is mostly barren while the Mexican side will have development. Played straight in some places, outright averted in others. [https://web.archive.org/web/20120418231918/http://www.hispanicallyspeakingnews.com/notitas-de-noticias/details/a-view-of-the-us-mexican-border/13612/ In this picture, right side is Mexico.]
{{reflist}}
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[[Category:Video Game Settings]]
[[Category:Truth in Television]]
[[Category:
[[Category:
[[Category:Dissonance Tropes]]
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