The Worldbuilding of Ranger's Apprentice- the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

    Just so I set the right expectations, remember that this is not a review of the Ranger's Apprentice series and its companion series, The Brotherband Chronicles. There is already an excellent review of by Grace To on Book Bloggers in the Chat; read that if you're looking for quality content. Rather, this post is a look at the bizarre worldbuilding lurking below the surface of Ranger's Apprentice, from the point of view of someone who picks apart poor worldbuilding for fun.

Part 1: The bad

    Throughout books three through seven, the worldbuilding is what most would consider low-effort, distilled, subpar, culture-appropriating garbage. Essentially, each nation is composed of the most basic stereotypes of a given ethnic group. Flanagan doesn't even try to hide this. Skandia? Hey, that sounds kind of like Scandinavia, which makes sense. Skandia is basically all viking myths compressed into a small, icy package. All Skandian men are massive, musclebound bootleg vikings, and all Skandian women are nonexistant. Picta? The name is a bit more subtle, referencing the Picts of Northern Scotland, but this analogy becomes instantly obvious once you learn that every resident of Picta is cosplaying a Braveheart character. The same can be said of all the other nations that were fleshed out- Araluen, a clear England analog, Arridi a very obvious North Africa rip-off, and Gallica is something like the inbred second cousin of feudal France. But don't worry, it gets better.

Part 2: The good

    In the later books, the worldbuilding gets a lot better. Not by much, mind you, but it'd be hard to get worse. From books eight and on, societies actually get fleshed out. Yeah, the countries are still blatant rip-offs of real countries, but Flanagan seems to get his stuff together and actually research the countries he copies. This isn't at all a good substitute for proper worldbuilding, but it's better than the disgustingly two-dimensional culture slices present before. For example, the country of Nihon-Ja, also known as crappy made in China Japan, is not a homogeneous lump of monoculturalism, but in fact suffers from internal schisms and conflicts of succession, much like Feudal era Japan.

Part 3: The ugly

    Frankly, I don't know what happened with the first and second books, The Ruins of Gorlan and The Burning Bridge. See, for most of the series, the setting is a sort of alternate universe historical fiction. There's no magic, or sorcery, or anything like that. It follows the lives of normal people doing things using normal person abilities.

    But, for some reason, books one and two seem to be attempting to be a children's rendition of the Lord of the Rings series. There's an evil king, given the suitable evil name Morgorath, and he uses his psychic powers (yeah, he has those) to control an army of evil bear-man hybrids known as Wargals. I don't know where this came from, but I'm glad the author got rid of these elements. It helps differentiate the books from a lot of other series.

    Some other weird things about the series are: 

• How do rangers fire their bows so quickly? Their fire rate is possible, and it's been replicated by archers, but they were using lower-powered bows. Imagine doing three bicep curls per second with a 90 pound dumbbell.
• Where do the Skandians get their food? They never raid food, and they don't farm. How do they support a specialized society without trade or agriculture?
• There's the idiotic idea that swords from Nihon-Ja can shear through a Western blade, because of their unique forging technique. In reality, this forging technique was used because they had low-quality steel that they needed to fold in order to purify. Western crucible steel is just as good, if not better.

Sorry, this one got long. I have more to say about worldbuilding in general but that's to be saved for later. The Ranger's Apprentice series is still enjoyable despite the poor worldbuilding. Or maybe not, I can't be objective because of the nostalgia.

    -Marco