> life during medieval times must have been so fun because video games, movies, shows or anime set during this time shows characters wandering town to town, village to village taking odd jobs and having fun and diverse stories
yeah so… media medieval life is basically the “van life” instagram of history.
real medieval europe was way less “wandering bard doing side quests”, way more “pls don’t starve or die of an infected scratch at 32.”
let me break the fantasy vs reality a bit:
in games/anime:
protagonist just dips from one town to another
picks up random quests like it’s a medieval gig economy
sleeps at taverns, flirts with npcs, solves problems, moves on
irl:
most people literally never went more than like 20–30 km from where they were born, ever
travel was slow, dangerous, and expensive
roads sucked, bandits existed, and there’s no roadside marriott, only maybe a flea-ridden inn, monasteries, or sleeping rough
wandering types did exist (peddlers, mercenaries, some scholars, pilgrims), but they were:
not considered cool protagonists, more like sketchy, poor, or desperate
living with constant risk: robbery, disease, starvation, getting pressed into some lord’s conflict
that “free roaming” fantasy is basically rpg game design: you need modular content and new locations, so the hero can’t just… stay home and weed cabbages.
media:
“help the blacksmith with a sword”
“escort a merchant caravan”
“slay 3 wolves”
“deliver letter to the duke”
reality:
90%+ of people were peasants doing agriculture. that’s it. year in, year out.
work = repetitive, physically brutal, and extremely seasonal
“odd jobs” were often “please help with harvest or everyone starves”
no “class change” mechanic: if you were born a serf, you stayed a serf unless something violently disrupted the system (war, plague, etc.)
there were specialists (craftsmen, clerics, merchants), but you didn’t just “try out blacksmithing for a week” like an rpg side quest. you apprenticed for years, under strict guild systems.
what media sells:
candles, wooden beams, warm fire, ale, storytelling
bards, dice games, bustling markets, quirky npcs
what reality included:
chronic malnutrition for a lot of people
no antibiotics, no anesthetics, no germ theory
childbirth = high-risk event
famines, plagues, wars, random lordly conflicts where your village just gets wrecked
legal system that can be… let’s say, “not super into due process”
there were festivals, carnivals, religious feast days, markets, and people absolutely did have fun — humans always squeeze joy out of misery somehow. joking, singing, drinking, sex, gossip, etc. but it’s fun against a background of risk, not fun like “permanent adventure mode.”
why does media make it look so “fun” and “varied”?
because:
a realistic medieval life story would be:
“year 1: i farm. year 2: i farm. year 3: i farm. then i get sick and die.”
not exactly bingeable.
you need:
mobility (to see new settings)
small arcs (odd jobs / quests)
agency (character choosing stuff, not just obeying their lord and the seasons)
so writers basically inject modern freedom fantasies into premodern worlds.
most fantasy is medieval cosplay with modern psychology:
characters talk like modern individuals with “dreams” and “finding themselves”
social mobility is way higher in the story than it ever was historically
violence is aesthetic rather than traumatic; poverty is textured rather than horrifying
even with all that, medieval life wasn’t just pure misery simulator. some genuinely interesting aspects:
tight local communities: you usually knew everyone. plus side: strong social bonds. downside: zero privacy and tons of social control.
festivals & religious calendar: lots of days oriented around rituals, food, music, and community events.
night sky with zero light pollution, stories told orally, music as a live-only experience.
for certain niches (scholars in monasteries, merchants on trade routes, knights, minstrels), life could be weirdly intense, dangerous, and occasionally exhilarating.
it just wasn’t “main character energy for everyone.” it was more “99% background npc, 1% maybe gets a saga.”
what you’re vibing with isn’t really “medieval life” afaict, it’s:
freedom from modern bureaucracy / algorithms
no emails, no hr, no linkedin, no optimization culture.
clear, tangible problems
“wolf threat” is emotionally simpler than “my job is meaningless but highly paid.”
narrative coherence
a life that looks like a story: journeys, tasks, visible progress, relationships forged on the road.
those are legit desires. they just get projected onto a time period that… probably would’ve killed both of us before we finished complaining about it.
if you actually wanted “medieval rpg life” rn, the closest real-world version is something like:
seasonal/manual work + slow travel + low tech
maybe long-distance hiking/backpacking, working random gigs, wwoofing / farm work, or ship crew stuff
still way cushier than then, but scratches a bit of that “odd jobs + wandering” fantasy without the plague multiplier.
if you wanna go deeper, i can also break down a specific show/game you’re thinking of and compare its world to the actual historical analogue.
> so where did this romanticization of medieval times began? how did it come to be?
short version: people didn’t really romanticize the middle ages during the middle ages. the big “medieval was so magical and wholesome” vibe is mostly a 18th–19th-century invention, supercharged again in the 20th century by fantasy lit, rpgs, and anime.
let’s do a quick timeline.
1300s–1600s humanists (like petrarch) start calling the time after rome the “dark ages,” basically framing it as a long cringe era before their own enlightened greatness.(Wikipedia)
they divided history into ancient → “middle” → modern. that “middle” slot was not a compliment; it was the awkward middle child.(Wikipedia)
so early modern europe = more “lol look at these barbaric monks” than “omg knights and taverns 🥺”.
jump to late 18th c: romanticism shows up and basically says “what if feelings > spreadsheets.”
romantics were reacting against the enlightenment + early industrialization: too much rationality, cities, smoke, bureaucracy.
they reach back to the middle ages as a symbol of:
“authentic” emotion
“organic” community
dramatic landscapes, ruins, cathedrals, knights, all that aesthetic bait
in lit + art, this shows up as:
gothic novels like the castle of otranto (1764) giving you haunted castles, dark corridors, medieval curses – the first wave of “medieval as atmospheric horror/aesthetic.”(Wikipedia)
the gothic revival in architecture, rebuilding churches and even parliaments to look medieval again; think neo-gothic spires and stained glass as a conscious throwback.(Wikipedia)
this is the point where “middle ages” stop being just “that dumb barbaric era” and start becoming a moodboard.
in the 1800s it really blows up. the word “medieval” itself only becomes common in the 19th c, which already tells you how late this self-conscious framing is.(Wikipedia)
key players:
sir walter scott – his historical novels like ivanhoe (1820) turned chivalric romance into blockbuster fiction, massively shaping how people imagined knights, tournaments, and “merry england.”(romtext.org.uk)
victor hugo – notre-dame de paris (1831) romanticizes medieval paris + cathedrals and literally helps spark real-life preservation/restoration of gothic buildings.(Fiveable)
pre-raphaelites & arts and crafts people like rossetti, millais, and william morris: medieval-looking knights, tragic maidens, arthurian vibes, plus handcrafted “medieval” decorative arts as a protest against industrial mass production.(Wikipedia)
underneath all the stained glass and brocade, there’s a pretty clear psychological move:
“modern life feels alienating and industrial; let’s idealize a time when things were supposedly beautiful, hand-made, and spiritually unified.”
it’s less about the actual 14th century and more about a weaponized nostalgia.
then governments see the vibes and go: “oh this is useful.”
monarchs and states start using medieval symbols (castles, orders of knights, legendary kings) to justify modern nationalism and monarchy.
example: neuschwanstein in bavaria – a literal fairy-tale pseudo-medieval castle built in the 19th century, decorated with wagner’s mythic medieval scenes.(Wikipedia)
so now “medieval” =
cozy authenticity for artists
glorious ancient destiny for politicians
everyone’s projecting their 19th-c anxieties onto a curated version of the past.
modern scholars call this whole phenomenon medievalism: not the middle ages themselves, but how later eras imagine and use them.(Wikipedia)
so when you say “medieval life looks so fun in media,” you’re basically swimming in 250+ years of accumulated medievalism, not raw history.
then you get the big pop-culture pipeline:
early 20th c fantasy lit (tolkien, lewis) formalizes the “pseudo-medieval” default:
tabletop rpgs (d&d) mechanize that into a game loop:
jrpgs + anime pick this up and remix it:
that wandering-adventurer thing you like isn’t really “medieval”; it’s:
20th-c fantasy worldbuilding
game design needs (modular quests, level progression)
stitched together and sold as “the middle ages.”
historians literally call the current wave neo-medievalism when they’re talking about how video games, movies, and fantasy franchises reuse this aesthetic.(Wikipedia)
underneath the knights and taverns, the romanticization does a few ideological jobs:
it launders hierarchy: feudalism becomes cozy loyalty, not structural unfreedom. you get noblesse oblige without famine.
it aestheticizes precarity: wandering with no stable income becomes “adventure,” not “you are one injury away from dying in a ditch.”
it solves modern alienation in fiction: in a medievalesque world, your role is clear (warrior, mage, healer), your work is concrete (wolf problem? fix wolf), and your story has arcs. irl rn most people are doing weird abstract labor for faceless orgs with no narrative closure.
so yeah, the romantic medieval you see isn’t a memory, it’s a modern fantasy construct built step by step from:
enlightenment dunking → romantic nostalgia → victorian aesthetic obsession → nationalist mythmaking → fantasy lit → rpg/game logic
if you want, next step we can pick one work you like (game/anime/series) and i’ll show you exactly which historical layers it’s remixing. that’s where it gets really fun/deranged.