I feel like the reason why the world building feels so real and complete is because it seems like the world was created first, and then the characters were built to fit in it, rather than the other way around as many other do.
Definitely sounds like how it should be done, and I feel like it makes for a better story that way, figuring out how the characters can fit in and interact with the setting, especially in a scenario like this
It's a shame it wont be getting a second season on Max I loved everything about Scavengers Reign. It's one of the most unique shows I've ever come across and the fact that nothing about the Flora and Fauna is explained makes it better!
Yes, I've heard this as well. If that's the case, shame indeed. But I also heard that it's coming to Netflix, and they might actually think about a season 2. So, hopefully, we get a season 2 somehow!
They did!? Wtf, that's extremely stupid. If netflix picks it up we might have a second season, yeah, but their track record with animated series is quite... Worrying
@@darioferretti3758 Do you mind giving some examples or elaborating on that? I'm sure there might be good reason to have misgivings, I just can't think of anything myself
@@gearandalthefirst7027 Most woldbuilders I've seen/heard of are male. Regardless, worldbuilding isn't a trait of a certain gender nor is it classified as masculine or feminine. BUT the things you focus on in your worldbuilding project can inherently be masculine or feminine. What OC said seems to focus on a masculine aspect. And that's all.
@@gearandalthefirst7027 I am 100% sure that the dude did not mean only men can world build lol. It's like saying "the feminine urge [insert something basic]".
@@catgames703ppl are so confused with gender nowadays, we’re bound to lose historical values of feminine emotion, and even women’s intuition, or the drive of man, or even a mans duty to protect
@@wonderescence it kind of inspired me to try my own animation projects, I understand the principles and think I have enough skill, just done flash for simplicity, but hand drawn is so charming
Yes, you can see traits of evolution in all of the organisms. I loved that aspect of it. It wasn’t random fantasy, everything was set in biological rules. Also, fungi played a large role on Vesta and fungi are known to connect organisms together through networks. It gave some rationale to the resurrection of Levi.
at the start of the video you describe Vesta as, among other things "lacking in artificiality". However as a biologists I got an intense feeling that the ecosystem is artificialy designed. Vesta is clearly a gaia world and may itself be designing the creatures but it's very clear that few things here are the product of natural evolution. In essence the world feels like biology based technology without the chaos of nature
Interesting take. Do you think those weird beings in the post credit scene have something to do with it? It wouldn't be unfathomable to think that, I hear it!
Had a similar school of thought. This is a created world that went feral a long time ago. Some of the stranger organisms seem to have been biotech machines, for lack of a better term.
i would really like to believe that there are pathways for such ecosystems to exist, but I could hardly point to anything here on earth that could encourage the development of the giant hollow cylinders or walls of telepathic bushes or parasitic plant things that could create any copy of any organism it could analyze. I hope there is at least some world out there like vesta though, earth is comparatively a disappointment.
Had the same feeling, especially after the "lil' alien that self-pollinates a flower" scene. It's so horribly inefficient that I find it hard to believe this was a natural thing, more of a remnant of an intelligent designer.
Yeah, so many of the creatures fill a niche so small and so dead-end that it could _never_ have been created naturally. I kind of got the feeling from this show that the ecosystem was designed in a Rick and Morty style, by conversationally going "haha wouldn't it be funny if..." and then animating it.
I didn't watch it while it was on Max, I binged it last night on Netflix and it's by far one of my favorite things I've seen in recent memory, the ecology and worldbuilding is so unsettling and fascinating, loved it the whole way through.
This show is the longest loveletter to Moebius' artwork.....Literally everything here screams Moebius,from color palette to line weight to subject matter
Actually the behavior of the “horselike” animals is actually more similar to lantern fish which exist in unfathomably large schools and use their signature light to communicate with their school. Coordinating exceptionally well.
THE MOST UNIQUE WORLDBUILDING EVER. I WAS SO INVESTED that I made my own collection of photos of the flora and fauna and have them all my own names. My favorite is glugslugs, the white slug-like creature that eats fruits.
Reminds me of Wayne Barlow's Darwin IV, featured in his book Expedition and later a mockumentary called Alien Planet. The book lets you travel across the lense of an expedition log and sketches of the main character who is pretty much the author himself on a human-alien expedition to the planet. Alien Planet appears like a documentary where we follow a robotic mission to the planet. What makes Darwin IV even more unique is how different from Earth it is: it's Mars sized, has almost no liquid water expanses and orbits an orange dwarf star. A giant "carpet" of a jello like mass covers the world's only ocean, walked on by giant creatures that feed through their feet. Clicking theropod-like blind predators run across the dry landscape chasing large preys with two legs places one in front of each other. Tiny rainbow colored arrow like creatures fleet en-masse across low vegetation. There is a huge range of creatures and ecosystems not just unique but adapted to the world's rules, different than what we have on Earth.
As a person who world builds as a hobby I can appreciate every thing here it is all so beautiful I'm definitely have to look up scavengers reign. The world I'm building I'm trying to replace all resources with natural alternatives that have multiple uses which allows decommissioning and ways to reproduce the resources. Bio naturalism is really puzzling and really satisfying well being outlandishly creative.
Maybe its just how alien and hostile it is to the outsider but Vesta has always felt like a realistic deathworld. You won't find anything like this on earth and the way characters talk about it, it does feel like the "hostility" of its nature is very feared or atleast well known. Its not some over the top deathtrap like something 40K would portray as a deathworld but its still very hostile to the point where it does truly feel like it would have a pretty low survival rate if you aren't properly equiped to deal with it.
Agreed. Here it's living creatures that function as part of an ecosystem, completely indifferent the human characters who find themselves trapped in the system, as opposed to plenty of movies where it's just giant monsters constantly chasing after the protagonists
Scavengers Reign for me is one of those stories and settings that comes along and pops the bubble of cynicism that grows as fiction writers disrespect your capacity to take in what they really want to create. Not that there isn't genuine wonder in others between it, but compromise is built into so many settings and stories to make them accessible, and every now and then a group just lets their world run wild in a literal sense and makes a place you might genuinely yearn to inhabit - danger, horror, and all.
tbf doesn't scavengers reign narratively allow itself to not need such compromise? Its supposed to be an alien world we dont fully understand after all, I dont think you could totally do something like this outside of fictional worlds where heavy emphasis is placed on living amongst the unknown, where anything really can happen.
@@badabing3391 Eh. Kind of? It's why the network was willing to run it, but is that why they wanted to do it? I reject the premise entirely that I need to be _fair_ to bland sci-fi or fantasy or any media. It already has all the money, why do I need to give it that respect? Capitalism inflates the value of mass appeal far beyond what most writers want to tolerate, every writer and artist interested in worldbuilding wants to build up works like this, but they're forced to satisfy a least common denominator between what audiences are willing to approach casually, the amount of cliche people looking for more are willing to stomach, and the time it takes to create.
@explosu i moreso mean that the wildness of this series is inherent to the type of story its trying to tell, even regardless of the authors who are writing it. You dont need to be fair to media as a whole, id just suggest that you entertain the idea that its possible the authors were fortunate to be writing this specific kind of story rather than their skills being the sole reason that the story's use of its setting is as good as it is. Other stories with similar settings emphasis should also be enjoyable.
I love the way you described the world as playing by its own rules indifferent the humans, and the only way they can survive is by working with it, rather than against it One great example of this that comes to mind is when Azi is seen riding with the herd and gets bumped around by them until she sees how they signal each other that they're about to move and starts moving with them
While it is very unique and interesting, just about everything feels, ironically, unnatural. Nothing in Scavengers Reign feels like it's actually part of an ecosystem, it's all very clearly invented. Every interspecies relationship in the show is very isolated, with there being at most like three different organisms in a given food chain. If you look at Earth ecosystems, you have very complex food webs that incorporate many different ecological niches. Speaking of niches, there's no competition to fill them in SR. There's no competition at all, really. Every organism feels like it was purpose-built to fit a specific role and to relate to one or two other organisms. You could argue that we just don't see enough of the ecosystem. Ok, but why? If the point of the worldbuilding is to establish an alien ecosystem (or multiple), we should be shown that ecosystem in enough depth. Maybe the intent is to show humans in a completely unfamiliar world. Could be more likely, but then what was the point of coming up with all the incredibly interesting ideas we see in the show? Certainly not to build a true ecosystem. What if none of the biological concepts we know apply to the world in SR? That very clearly isn't the case, as we are repeatedly shown interspecies relationships that mimic Earth ecology. Does the massive diversity without explanation foster a sense of discovery? Maybe at first, but the world is never explored in enough depth to really discover anything beyond the superficial. It's mostly a backdrop. That "feeling like a rube goldberg machine" is honestly a negative when you're building something as massively complex as an ecosystem. It's not just "one creature affects the next affects the next," a true ecosystem is "one creature creates habitat features while it gets food, which affects every organism that lives in that habitat, which supports a different complex web of species, all the while the original creature affects several predator and prey species at once." If you took a piece out of the ecosystems in SR, the entire machine would implode. The defining trait of an ecosystem, however, is being able to fill that gap because of biodiversity within niches. Without that, there is no resilience to outside pressure. That's what really puts the last nail in the coffin of the believability of SR from a biological/ecological perspective, there is no outside pressure. Everything we see functions as a perfect system, clean and efficient. That's not how nature works, real nature is messy. Organisms in nature compete to survive, while everything in SR exists as it is with no threats besides the humans. Those humans shouldn't be the only source of environmental pressure. Evolution is driven by that pressure, which creates related species in phylogenies. That is totally absent here. Overall, SR presents a wide variety of interesting, creative ideas that use their weirdness to distract from the lack of total interconnectedness inherent to a true ecosystem. The show is great, as the world doesn't need to be that complex in all aspects in order to support the story being told, but it's quite the stretch to call it something akin to "the best worldbuilding." It wows with how fascinating everything is, but doesn't hold up when you use a reference frame of actual ecology, phylogeny, and biology.
As with the majority of world building it has been built specifically to fit the story they wanted to tell. The best ones trick you into thinking that everything has been mapped out, and trusting that the stuff we can’t see is there and will make sense. The creators have gone to great effort to make what is seen appear to make sense in its isolated bubble. It doesn’t need to show the ecosystem in broader details because the only parts that matter are the parts specifically designed to cause conflict. I do agree that there is a lot of hyperbole in display here regarding this show.
@@intergalactic92 Exactly, they wanted to showcase an entertaining means of worldbuilding and a group of people who go out to do research but not interfere with its system. You can tell that this show was created by creative and intelligent writers and animators. I am quite sure there are more worlds out there in the universe in our world as well because we haven't reached them yet. We imagine ourselves through artistic mediums that we made it there and imagine our people co-existing with that alien world and the robots bringing back these resources for humankind. Which hasn't happened yet. It's free to dream and create but it's expensive to send a group of twelve into an alien habitat. 😄
Max absolutely made the right move by canceling this show. The whole show, including the ending was nearly perfect. And I don't think anyone could say with a straight face that they could imagine season 2 being better or even measuring up. It'd be like having a perfect, grass-fed burger cooked by a master, and then following up with a McDonalds burger
A mix of Studio Ghibli (obviously, as you pointed out) and Laloux's Fantastic Planet/La Planete Sauvage & Wayne Barlowe's Expedition/Alien Planet, all on a level rarely seen. Recommended for both the science fiction and exoplanet enthusiast. :)
Don't need to watch but giving you a like and just here to say Scav Reign fucking rules. The reddit community is great. Have never felt like a show was mine as much as this.
What struck me is how there's so many symbiotic relationships both parasitic and non-parasitic. The creatures Ursula & Sam use for breathing masks, the "fish" that nibble Azi's rash, and the "solar raptors" that defend the white plant from creatures that eat its fruit.
If you like world building you need to watch Andor. It's star wars but its nothing like any of the movies or other tv shows we've ever scene. Some of the best world building i've ever seen. Same with Attack on Titan
beginner : i gotta make cool stuff intermediary : i must make everything coherent and go about detailling exact workings and origins of everything advanced : i gotta make cool stuff
To end this world and make it friendly for human life you'd need the Ultra Relativistic Electron Beam from that british animated science channel with the birds
@@voidlets3359 What people call questionable is the fact it doesn't sugar coat anything. The world feels real and everything that happens will question your morality as well as the characters.
Man, I really wanted to like the show, but alot of the worldbuilding was a miss for me. For example, you mentioned that we get to see the ingenuity of the characters using the local resources into tools, but we never see them investigate or experiment! They already figured out that the stones inside the rhinoceros-like creature (it's the opening shot of the show). How did they figure out? We never see it. The first time we see Azi craft the whistle: it's already perfected. We've never seen the creature she calls before. There was no chance for us to observe and familiarize ourselves with the ecosystem.
Perhaps someone from the orbital station had sent a group there before. They sent a few books back with research in case it reached its directed coordinates. Once it arrived at the power orbital station, someone there realized they were still alive. And they sent a new group of people to investigate if the information was accurate and see if the survivors were still around? Perhaps someone on the team was tasked with finding said survivors and kill them. But I'm sure the ecosystem encapsulated them within a few months to a year before sending away their research. But now we will never know how they knew to use these tools or resources from the plants or animals to their advantage since the show was cancelled. 😥 Edit: I'm speculating since the characters don't mention anything much about being sent there for a specific reason or how they came about with this gained knowledge.
I'll be honest with you, when I first heard about the concept of the show, it was right up my alley. But when I watch the show, besides how insipidly annoying every single character was besides the robot, I found the World building childishly convenient. Poison in one scene, no problem the plant in the next scene fixes it. Cliff that you need to circumvent, no problem, there's an animal right there that can turn into a parachute. Need a backpack? The plant in the next scene can become a backpack, on and on. It felt like a world design for a show about humans surviving, not a world that was alien, that humans happened to stumble upon.
You could use a decent VPN, it should work. Or if you scour the internet, there might be some ripped version of it streaming on some random website. Or check scavengers reign reddit, there migt be some links in there that should help!
Haha, there's a lot to list. I can't give timestamps, but I'll mention a few; Obviously, Scavengers Reign. Nausicaa of the valley of the wind, My neighbor Totoro, Howl's moving castle, Kiki's delivery service, Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, Blade Runner, Star wars, Gravity, Dunkirk, Your Name, Guardians of the galaxy, Spiderverse, Alien, Lord of the Rings, Arcane, Pirates of the Caribbean, Akira, Cowboy Bebop, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Jurassic Park, Elden Ring, Game of thrones, Hogwarts legacy, God of war, Zelda, Ghost of Tsushima, Annihilation, Matrix...
I haven’t seen most of the studio Ghibli films referenced, so it’s pretty hard to get an idea of the similarity when all the images are blurred :p Is that a censoring thing from RU-vid?
No, it was precautionary. I blurred it. I have a video on my channel talking about a copyright strike from Ghibli. So, I went ahead and blurred Ghibli content to prevent further copyright issues.
Yo buddy, after watching your videos I believe that they can be improved editing wise by a noticeable degree. So if you need a video editor pls let me know, I can edit well at a low cost compared to alot of the other editors you will find. Anyways, good video though, I believe you have a good amount of potential
i respect your hustle but the editing looks fine to me. i like how lowkey it is, the visuals match the narration, and this is more of a listenable type of video anyway. nothing stood out to me as amateur id reccomend reaching out to channels that are monetized already
@@foogriffy Yeah ik, but there are definitely certain things that can be improved. There's nothing in this world that can't be lol, but I never called it amateur, I just said I can make it better. Anyways, I will try out some Monetized creators, see if I get hired by another dude, I already work for someone but hey the Hustle is real.
Bro just discovered a genre called Speculative Ecology. Like seriously this type of World Building isn't unique you can find it in deviant art after like 2 minutes
Great series, BUT, it fell into the VERY tired trope of all the men being either stupid, weak, or inept, and all the women somehow being stronger both physically and mentally. It's extremely unscientific, as well as makes the writing VERY predictable at times. It's as if writers with a particular political bent can't or wont get over themselves to accurately portray the genders. Women = Almost always good, strong, and brave : Men = Stupid and bad The world building was indeed phenomenal though.
The captain was a man who was neither stupid or weak, and the leader of the scavenger crew that came later to help is pretty clearly a bad character that has no regard for others' lives.
The Captain was pretty weak, and over emotional most of the time. And while yes, the female scavenger was certainly a sociopath, she was still portrayed as stronger than her male counterparts. Problem is, when you actually know gendered physiology, it comes off as stupid and unscientific. But you keep the faith fella.
@@OYME13 It's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy. You seek it more than it necessary, and you see it more than it's necessary. There was not a large number of characters. And I still wouldn't say the captain was weak. He was older but not weak.
@@JHeb_ I could see where most of the characters story arcs would basically go from the tropes I saw. When I can predict your writing, it's a problem. Are you honestly attempting to argue for homogeneity of opinion? It's a piece of media, not an historical work. Feel free to love the shite out of it, if that makes you happy. I did in fact enjoy it, quite a lot, I just felt let down by the certain aspects of the character writing as I see it.
@@OYME13 I'm don't want to change your view. More like see where you're coming from. I think this conversation is pretty pointless at this point, literally nothing to argue about lol
