Critical Themes

The Age of Elizam explores themes of fear, listlessness, and what it means to live at the end of the world. It is set on a peninsula surrounded by natural phenomenon that are constructed as dangerous, threatening, and most of all unnatural by those who know themselves as "conscious-kind". A term that is only one piece of a frontier narrative that underlies the social fabric of this Age. A time when societal myths posit the City of Marsétan and its residents as emblematic of civilization and progress and thus superior to the rest of the world. This is not a inevitable development but rather a conscious - life-destroying - choice made and re-made over generations to affirm an incompatibility between conscious-kind and the rest of the world. Yet as the world further erodes and dissolves into The Lost, this is seen as a sign of the inherent evils of the natural world and only affirms the belief of conscious-kind that they need new techniques of rising above. The year as they know it is now 493 AS and the world may truly this time be coming to an end. Here, questions emerge of whether it is possible to end the world gracefully? If those who deny the reality that surrounds them are any better than those who seek only to ensure their comfort and legacy? What does it take to change the world and who should and will suffer for it?
Ultimately the central aim of this setting is to problematize some of the common themes present in fictional narratives of bastions and frontiers, especially for those situated in settler-colonial contexts.
A reading list for those interested in learning more: Blogs, opinion pieces, and short articles: Francisco Cantú, 2019, When the Frontier Becomes the Wall.
Books: Emma LaRocque, 2010, When the Other Is Me: Native Resistance Discourse, 1850 - 1990.
Video Essays: Game Assist, 2022, "Decolonization is not a metaphor": Settler Colonialism and Indigeneity in Video Games.
I will continue to add to this reading list and hopefully at some point include some annotations to aid in finding further writing. This setting is likely to grow and evolve as my own understanding of settler-colonialism, frontier myths, and game design shift. My hope is to ultimately craft a setting that allows for people to tell grounded, healing, and caring stories of struggling for liberatory futures at the end of the world.