How do we fix isekai cities?

To fix isekai cities, you have to start by fixing isekai.
And to do that... you have to stop watching them.

never going to happen, otaku pendering anime fans have no standards

Have them not exist. The idea of cities in pre-gunpowder Europe is ridiculous. It was Rome until it fell, then Constantinople, and fuck all else.

Everything else was towns *at best* and a bunch of villages, hamlets, and random farms and shit.

Have them not exist. The idea of cities in pre-gunpowder Europe is ridiculous. It was Rome until it fell, then Constantinople, and fuck all else.

Yeah but the problem is that isekais aren't based in europe, they are based on Dragon Quest, if you want isekais to be fixed then you need to go back in time and make that JRPG hammer down how medieval towns were villages, hamlets, and random farms and shit or just make japanese education teach european medieval history better lol

Dragon Quest also doesn't have major cities though. It's all villages and castle towns for the first several games. You know, like medieval Europe.

walls might help

Well shit I stand corrected then so the nips are just stupid I guess, I already blame the otaku for the state of the manga industry anyway.

Have them not exist. The idea of cities in pre-gunpowder Europe is ridiculous. It was Rome until it fell, then Constantinople, and fuck all else.

anon you're literally retarded. Plenty of cities existed during the middle ages. Was Paris as big as Rome at its height--of course not. But it was still a city.

Also isekai clearly go for more of a renaissance setting.

army to sneak from behind the town.

army

sneak

hate to break it to you, but it is pretty different for an army to sneak behind a castle when the back is just a giant flat plain bare field with a very small collection of trees surrounding it

Was Paris as big as Rome at its height--of course not. But it was still a city

Paris's population was like 3k in the year 1100 CE. No it god damn wasn't. It basically didn't become a real city until the tail end of the fucking Crusades right as gunpowder was arriving on the scene. Not the time period isekai usually draws from.

Although thank you for letting me make my point all the stronger.

niggas be out here following the concentric model an shi'

It is IMPOSSIBLE to create a functioning city if every single person is capable of unleashing mass destruction on a whim.

A world of magic would function exactly like that of Shinsekai Yori
Low population, each person lives with a wide breadth of each other, every house is produced via easy to repair materials, and there exists a dictatorial council who keeps a sharp eye on each and every citizen out of an extreme paranoia that someone managed to bypass their systems and can unleash a nuke

Every citizen deserves the right to defend ones self
But things start to get blurry when it takes only one person to ruin the entire place

But what if only a few people can cause massive harm?
No effect
A single poisoned cookie in the jar require you still check each and every cookie.
You don't know how many powerful users exists and you don't know when they may arrive

Also isekai clearly go for more of a renaissance setting.

Hence all the guns.

And printing presses

Fuck I might retwatch this one again, that anime was a trip

The average isekai city is pretty small, it has merchants/a market at best but I heard these existed anyway. It's shoujo isekai that goes for renaissance afaik.

ywn get to drink yourself into a stupor and cuddle with the tavern wench after slaughtering numerous goblins and skeletons while defending the town from the DemonKing(tm)'s army with the magical sword "(insert name here)" that uses light and holy magic and glows a kickass gold color.

why live

Just use any city that's not german.

not that anon, but by 1200 the population of Paris was estimated to be in the 100, 000.
the population of most European settlements may not seem much today, that is true, but large cities and towns did exist in the middle ages.

I don't want that. Nope.
I'll take the slaughterhouse instead of that

It would be interesting if we had an Isekai (or just fantasy settings in general) with a setting that wasn't just contextualized around the MC and the linear story drawn for them. I'd like for there to be things like inter-factional relationships that are ongoing and things like wars or other major events to occur routinely in the background that only involve the MC insofar as they wind up pushed between the conflicts that are ultimately unconcerned with them. Maybe have something like the stereotypical Adventurer's Guild guiding the MC and/or their party towards hunt marks/targets/contracts that are already underway by other adventurers. It'd just be more interesting for these worlds to feel like something is ongoing other than just The Adventuerer's Saga And Events Related To The Adventuerer's Saga, or worse The Adventuerer's Saga And How Every Single Action Taken Within This World Is Based Entirely Around The Adventurer's Saga.

an anime where a new guild master is installed despite not knowing anything, and it turns out that they're in charge of organizing quests and town events, so they have to go around setting up the monsters and treasures like an irl dungeonmaster for whenever the MC arrives

not that anon, but by 1200 the population of Paris was estimated to be in the 100, 000.

Yes. I'm aware. The population of Paris skyrocketed between 1100 and 1300.

Also, 100k isn't a large city, although I will concede it's at least a "city".

But, again, that's late Crusades just a few decades off gunpowder. Not really the period most isekai is going for and even if it were, that's 2 cities across a continent.

isn't there a bug-fixing isekai or something?
i believe it's hugely unpopular

STOP
MAKING
THEM
FLAT

That would be funny

The idea of cities in pre-gunpowder Europe is ridiculous

Good thing its a different world with magic, monsters and often other laws of physics as well. So there is no need to worry about Europe since it isn't Europe.

That scenario would require the "capability to unleash mass destruction" to be roughly equal, or at least at the same relative scale as average adult vs expert martial arts are, which is usually not the case.

tear down the walls to increase diversity

Make them actually look like fantasy cities instead of feudal european ones.

that's real pretty
realistically, cities will need to be layered and have taller buildings which tower over the poor people areas
i don't know why they're always so flat and evenly distributed

Good thing its a different world with magic, monsters and often other laws of physics as well. So there is no need to worry about Europe since it isn't Europe.

People being able to cast fireball doesn't suddenly make large scale economic and social changes required for large cities to be developed and maintained.

i don't know why they're always so flat and evenly distributed

Because cities have historically been flat. Large cathedrals and shit have been multigenerational building projects. They weren't slapped all over the place.

and evenly distributed

That's just good planning

That's just good planning

classism exists in real life and in fantasy
there's no way a merchant will want to live anywhere near a serf who has the same amount of land as you for some reason

AI slop

Stop doing this.

That looks like shit.

there's no way a merchant will want to live anywhere near a serf who has the same amount of land as you for some reason

Generally isekai towns have shit like merchant districts.

It's not like the noble district has the same size shit as the fucking slums. Doesn't mean shit isn't relatively evenly spread within districts.

You literally don't know what is or isn't art you AI-posting Indian.

That looks even worse than what you posted before, christ.

Because cities have historically been flat

It's fantasy.

I'll reiterate, you do not know what art is. Your opinion is valueluess.

It's fantasy.

Unless the fantasy world has earth mages skilled in construction all over the place, it's going to be fucking flat.

Also, even if it did, anywhere but the richest areas are still going to be fucking flat.

And if you do introduce earth mages able to construct sturdy stone walls at will, your writing then has to account for that shit vis a vis combat and warfare. "It's fantasy" isn't a magic button that lets you worldbuild whatever the fuck you want without any concern for how it hangs together.

So?just .1% nuke level is enough to warrant mass surveilance on everyone.

You will not eat a bowl of candy even if you knew that only 1 was poisoned

Just stop with pseudo-medieval bullshit and do something unique, like a Night City from Cyberpunk 2077, but powered entirely by magic, or lean hard into Art Deco, or some cool Jules Verne shit. Do anything other than the same old slop.

That would be because that one was French. Ōban Star-Racers was very french, even if it was made for broadcast in several nations.

this looks nice
i always felt that if we're doing imaginary cityscapes then everything needs to be built tall-wise, kind of like a modern day chongqing
especially if it's fanart, you can fit so much shit in one picture

That wasn't my experience when playing WoW.
A lvl 80 asshole would camp and gank all the new players right outside the starting area, sometimes within. Until a GM or an opposing lvl 80 player showed up we just got forced into respawning as far from out corpse as possible or just log out.

everyone now isekai'd to battle academy cities from late 2000s/early 2010s.

Not at all what I had in mind. I think even better reference would be LA from Blade Runner, with noir atmosphere, magic holograms, vertical architecture, constant rain because magic fucks up the weather or some shit.

Good thing I didn't isekai as a student, I get to take advantage of all the girls who drop out.

Actually, considering the existence of hostile humanoid creatures, actual demons, angry gods and horrible firebreathing flying lizards, it doesn't make sense for small villages to exist.

Only if they are hostile. If they are all intelligent enough to speak and reason with, you can have some level of peaceful coexistence.

Pic related is the of Von Thünen’s model for isolated states.
This relatively simple diagram shows off how an isolated city-state, like how one would form in the Bronze Age or in a world populated by terrible monsters, would naturally form and organize itself.
-Ironically, the first layers to form are the outside: crops, ranching, and primary producers cutting back the forest to develop land, but keeping 'managed' groves within a certain distance of everyone so people can still access it for firewood, hunting, and raising pigs. That pastureland in the back could be thought of as unworked public land people might raise cattle or sheep in common.
-Most of these farms are a patchwork mess of 1-30 acre homesteads run by families of varying income levels. However, occasionally some of this land is owned by wealthy nobles: they buy exhausted land for nothing, let it go fallow, and then raise commercial beef, horses for war, or turn it into park land for hunts.
-The market urban area in the center forms from the conjunction point of all the neighboring farmers - basically, the shortest distance everyone can easily walk a few hours or so into town to buy and sell goods. This is typically near a river to give access to water and transportation. The urban area then grows and develops as these farmers are able to feed more skilled tradespersons, merchants, etc..
-'Horticulture' is specifically noted as the intense deliberate monoculture of grains, and deliberately closer to the urban area, to both protect it and to funnel access to milling. If the crops peasants in the back get burned or destroyed the community can 'contract' into the more fortified center and subsist on grain stores, but if the grain is destroyed everyone unironically dies. These farms are also different in that they're commercial operations: wealthy landowners (typically nobles) who operate 100-300 acre farms growing wheat for domestic consumption.

Put more effort into backgrounds, put in some clutter, townspeople going about their business in the background, make the cities look lived in. In most anime cities and villages look way too sterile and fucking boring like stage decorations.

I've come to realize how much I miss these. They were really stupid and illogical for countless reasons, but as a giant space whose entire existence is just eternal battle for the sake of our stupid narrative, there's nothing more perfect you could assign. I was doing some writing and needed the core foundation for a conceptual space, now I think this unlocked just what I needed to do.

Can I be a maid? I'd like to be a battle academy maid.

comfy architecture

Since every building has the same style it usually means a masonry guild holds a monopoly and can charge whatever they want, which is not so comfy

walkable town

"walakble is a vague concept, Los Angeles and New York city are walkable since you can only walk because the traffic is so congested, essential business are limited to walking distances since you can't drive to them in a reasonable amount of time.

little pollution

You just don't see the horse shit and people throwing their shit out the window on to the streets and the heavy metals and bacteria in the drinking water because *magic*

widely available food from stalls and restaurants

All that farm fresh food and not a farm in sight, mainly because the author doesn't know what a farm looks like or even how quickly certain foods can spoil like fish and meat in general.

somehow always jobs that you can do with literally no xp

It's like ths anywhere you go except they jobs either don't pay what you want them to pay or are very undesirable (removing corpses, gathering "night soil", intensive manual labor)

neat little adventure guild where they pay you to go take out small creatures in the local woods

This is retarded since there is always a count or noble who owns all rights to the forests bounty and would have your head for poaching. The noble would have to give direct permission to local hunters to even hunt anything bigger than a rabbit.

clear water

Doesn't mean clean water

clear skies

Droughts are not comfy

nice people

City dwellers are shitty no matter where you go.

always some tavern where people gather and give you missions

There's always someone in the local bars looking for someone to help them move meth or rob a place

get regarded as hero for defeating enough small creatures in woods

They get to keep al the meat AND turn you in to the local lord for poaching

comfy inns and hotels to stay in

No

relatively easy to find brothel if you want one

That's called an alley

Make one Isekai where the protagonists build his village and administers it after starting rough, be with slaves or free people.
Shield Hero had the perfect opportunity to do this, but alas they prefer wasting time with useless battles against giant turtles than do something interesting.

Retard. Paris was around 200k people in 1300s, while Consntatinople had 70k.

It's easy: design cities based on real life logic instead of a shitty MMO logic.

Shield Hero had the perfect opportunity to do this

Cut content from the LN

No, there were no maids in cute uniforms or cart girls in 1050 europe. So those need to be removed too.

Also, all girls will need smallpox marks or leprosy.

Unless they're milk maids or cow handlers

all girls will need smallpox

Smallpox would have been relatively rare in Europe in 1050. Same with leprosy. Not saying it didn't exist, but it was hardly ubiquitous.

Paris

Surely you mean Lutetia

pre-gunpowder Europe

Also upper estimates put the population of Constantinople at 400k in 1200.

It's less about the specific diseases and more that no actual medieval world would have been filled with cute anime girls who look perfect.

Now that actually looks good unlike the other two trash you posted.

Wouldn't want to live there, though.
Think about all the bodies of children at the bottom of that house canyon who slipped and fell down.

It's fantasy.

Wouldn't want to live there, though.

Yes I would. It looks cool.

Think about all the bodies of children at the bottom of that house canyon who slipped and fell down.

I'm different. I won't fall.

With that in mind I think the most 'accurate' fantasy city I've seen that comes to mind is probably that one fantasy city in Children Who Chase Lost Voices? Pic related.
The outside of the town is mostly farms and small groves, roads and fields are fenced in with hedges, the town itself is built on an island in the interior of a lake to act as a natural moat, further walled, with access only through two bridges, there's some denser urban development, but still more farms inside, and the hill (if you squint) is partially hollowed out into a somewhat natural fort.
My only criticism is the windmills wouldn't be placed in the highest point - that'd be reserved for clergy, nobles, etc.. But I think in the movie this caste actually lived in an old flying machine.

Then why do they eat?
Why do they sleep?
Why aren't all the little girls naked at all times?
Even fantasy has to abide by some form of reason and logic.

I'm different. I won't fall.

But you're not a child. Are you?
Either way it doesn't change the fact that it's a child killer. Just think about all the cute, almost retarded girls that would have grown up to be easy lays but ended up dead because they were being clumsy kids.

It even got the "wilderness" correctly in that in ye oldest times a lot of what was considered the 'wild' or 'wastes', was just land that had been rescinded or abandoned by people because of crop failure, drought, debt, etc.. And left fallow and overgrown while people contracted back into already established areas to further work them. These places could be quite common and a lot of historical development was waves of going back and forth to try and homestead again and again.

So a lot of the ruins you'd find scattered across the landscape weren't dungeons or fortifications, but the derelict infrastructure and rotten homes: the straw or tile roofs would collapse first, leaving behind these stone or earth mounds everywhere that don't really look like anything but odd piles. Sometimes fields and animals would be left behind since it wasn't worth it to process them (and people might return to pick them back up again), and some were capable of managing on their own like root vegetables, leafy greens, gourds, fruit trees, and most livestock. Likewise, it also doesn't take too long for the forest to consume these places and for actual wildlife to move in.

Granted, if this is a ~fantasy world~ these abandoned farming settlements are absolutely perfect for monsters, especially ogroids and beastmen, to live in. One might wonder how come the world can house so many orcs, kobolds, and goblins, but they could just be circling around civilization like scavengers - constantly slinking into abandoned or compromised spaces such as these.

My only criticism is the windmills wouldn't be placed in the highest point - that'd be reserved for clergy, nobles, etc.

It really depends on their society, religion, and their purpose. Even if they were sky worshipers who favor the highest point, one could make windmills at the highest point for religious reasons relating to worshiping the wind. The main problem with putting them in a high place is that you would have to cart the grain up to them, and the flour back down. Also that milling doesn't really need that much wind, and a high point could provide so much wind as to damage the mill. However one might have some other use for them where the highest point and most wind is vital, such as a water pumping, where they are actually pumping water out to the more distant fields or some other town higher up. Historically part of the reason for the highest points being reserved for the clergy and nobility was related to those points also being the most defendable and thus the most safe, but that still depends on the structure and threats. Also for something that size you may well only have a single noble family, and the clergy being in the town proper.