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Decade Dissonance: Difference between revisions
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* 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-Tech|eclectic technology]].
* 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 [[Decade Dissonance]] within ''itself'' - there are TV studios, computers and modern guns (right alongside Tommy Guns, mind), but everyone drives 1930s cars and TV shows from maybe 10-15 years ago are in black and white.
*** 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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== 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}}.
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* ''[[Oryx and Crake]]'' (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 [[Old Kingdom|The Old Kingdom]], people are using swords and riding horses while in neighboring Ancelstierre they're using guns and shooting bombs at things. This is because most technology fails in the presence of magic (this also means that the Perimeter Guards have guns ''and'' swords, because any magical creature that gets close enough will make their guns fail).
* 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 {{spoiler|Aviendha's vision: the descendants of the Aiel are reduced to little more than savages, while the Lightmakers, descendants of the Seanchan, have "high-tech" equipment (they are building a railway through the desert and have some kind of shotgun). Justified because the Seanchan could benefit from the technological improvements that were popping up in Rand's academies, while the Aiel were almost hunted to extinction.}}
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== Live Action TV ==
* ''[[Star Trek: Enterprise
* ''[[Buck Rogers in The 25th Century|Buck Rogers]]'' is also a bit confused. In the pilot, New Chicago and other major cities were protected by domes, and a [[Mad Max]] atmosphere reigned outside them. That seems to have been dropped later in the series.
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*** 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 40000]]'' different planets within the Imperium can have massively different technology levels and cultural views. Examples range from "feral worlds" with mostly medieval technology (save what's imported from other planets), to planets with fairly modern-looking cites (except with more skulls and statues) to dystopian hive worlds where the entire populace lives inside enormous plasteel towers surrounded by uninhabitable wasteland.
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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 of Steamworks and Magick Obscura|Arcanum]]'' deconstructed this. The reason that cities like Qintarra and Dernholm (the capital of Cumbria) have no advanced technology is because they rejected them in favor of using magic. Magic and technology do not work well together, so focusing on one or the other (or, as in Caladon, maintaining a careful balance between the two) is a choice a society needs to make. (For humans, focusing on magic to the exclusion of technology is a bad call; for elves, it's a necessity.)
* 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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