 Fantasy: March 06, 2024 Issue [#12446] |
This week: Flags Edited by: Robert Waltz  
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Every day in school, we said the pledge to the flag, 'with liberty and justice for all,' and I believed all that.
—Fred Korematsu
There is much more to being a patriot and a citizen than reciting the pledge or raising a flag.
—Jesse Ventura
Every nation has a flag.
—Ayman Odeh |
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You've created a society (or five or a dozen of them) for your Fantasy setting. You have a pretty good idea what it stands for, the nature of its inhabitants, its place in the larger pattern. Great! Now, can you distill all that into one representative design on a waving sheet of cloth?
Or whatever material. Most, but not all, national flags in our world are rectangular in shape; a ratio of between 1:2 and 2:3 (vertical to horizontal) seems to be the most common. A couple of them are square, which is a special case of rectangle. One of them is of irregular shape: the flag of Nepal. It could be interesting to switch that up a bit in fiction.
While every nation has a flag, not every flag symbolizes a nation. US states have state flags, for instance. Some cities have designed flags. We also have flags for subcultures and ideologies, such as the rainbow flag, Jolly Roger, or Gadsden flag.
Now, one might think, "Well, the culture I made up is symbolized by a rooster; I'll just put a rooster on the flag." While you can do that, consider this: Nowhere on the American flag appears a bald eagle, nor do the lion and unicorn show up on the Union flag.
That's because one of the main purposes of a flag is to be recognizable from far away, for instance on a ship's mast or castle tower. Consequently, many flags eschew complex designs in favor of bold colors and simple shapes. I've heard that the ideal flag features no words, uses no more than four colors (preferably fewer), and should be simple enough for a young child to draw a reasonable facsimile of.
There are other symbols to consider, of course, such as crests or seals, or coats of arms. These can be as complex and symbolic as one desires, within reason, since you generally don't have to recognize them across a battlefield or stretch of ocean.
In our world, the sometimes subtle symbolism of flags and seals and the like usually falls within the purview of heraldry (though vexillology is the word for the study of flags, while a vexillographer is a designer of flags). Heraldry, at least in Europe, developed its own jargon, sometimes incomprehensible to those not in the know. But a symbol, flag or otherwise, is far more recognizable than its description.
Which makes their use that much harder for those of us limited to the written word, but as always, writers can find a way. |
Some fantasy for your perusal:
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Last time, in "Setting the Clock" , I talked about different timekeeping on different worlds.
NaNoNette  : I haven't ever paid too much attention to the way time moves (or the days are measured) when reading Sci-Fi stories. They all seemed to be just ignoring that issue.
Fairies, however, do have a different time. If someone is trapped in fairie for two days, they will come back to human time several years later.
Perhaps Fairie is moving at close to the speed of light and experiencing time dilation.
Jtpete 1986  : In my first book, the alien world had two suns. Their "year" lasted over 300 earth years as there was never an occasion where it was dark. The suns were far enough from the planet where the surface temperature was only 900 degrees at any given time. The inhabitants were made of a crystal-like material were the heat passed through them and there was this "liquid" like substance over half the planet that was used to cool them off. It was sort of like anti-freeze on earth.
Now, that's a truly alien setting.
Beholden  : Thank you very much for including my short story, An Un-birthday, in your Editor's Picks section.
Hope you got some new readers out of it!
oldgreywolf on wheels  : Also, planetary rotation affects weather patterns. Violent storms around the terminator are possible. Or ho, hum weather.
Lots of factors affect the weather. I might talk about the subject in a future editorial.
So that's it for me for March! Until next time,
DREAM ON!!!
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