Talk:Empire of the Isles/@comment-26536672-20160630001759

After a significant amount of reading up on the Empire (for the umpteenth time), I simply have to express my impressions to get them off my chest. It appears to me that, most precisely, the four non-sovereign nations that constitute the Empire are based on the four major ethnolinguistic groups of Europe, coinciding quite nicely with the geographic regions with which each of the islands correlate.

Gristol would be the primarily Germanic countries; England, Germany, the Low Countries, Frankish and Norman parts of Northern France, and maybe some Nordic influence in the north. The Germanic countries were the first to industrialize and modernize on a major scale, as is Gristol within the world of Dishonored, and, on a more subjective level, Gristol's cities do sound oh so very English.

Serkonos predominantly represents the Romance/Italic/Latin countries of Southern Europe, as confirmed explicitly by the devs, as well as the additionally Mediterranean country of Greece. Southern locale, warm weather, spicy culture (ooh), and the actual word of Harvey Smith cetainly gives this impression.

Morley, meanwhile, is equivalent to the modern Celtic nations and their peoples, especially the Gaels of Scotland and Ireland. The article on Morley mentions that several explicit links have been drawn between Morely and these Goidelic nations (though I cannot seems to trace the sources), and such a sense does emerge after hearing about the culture and historical events of Morley and their real-world parallels in Scotland and Ireland.

Tyvia is where things start getting kinda fuzzy. A lot of circumstantial evidence suggests that Tyvia is most heavily based off of the Slavic countries of Europe, such as the names of the cities and inhabitants, as well as Harvey's mention that the dev team's general precept of Tyvian fashion as resembling that of the Russian-authored, Russian-set Anna Karenina. The Trivia section does, however, mention in a rather conjectural tone that Tyvia's climate resembled that of the non-Slavic Sweden, though this could apply just as much to the climate of Northern Russia, maybe around St. Petersburg. The most glaring issue I find is that such a categorization of Tyvia being the Slavic equivalent is that it effectively excludes two major Slavic groups, the West Slavic Poles, Czechs, and Slovaks (living in a temperate continental/oceanic Central European climate) and the ever-loveable South Slavs of the Balkans (with climates ranging from continental to Mediterranean, but rarely, if ever, uniformly cold). This, of course, could nevertheless simply be the result of the dominant Western perception of Slavs being that of vodka-swilling, ushanka-wearing Russkies in the snow (not innacurate when applied to this more narrow grouping). Food for thought, if nothing else.

Of course, I'm not suggesting that anything be added to any of the pages themselves, given that this is pretty egregiously speculative, but I was merely wondering if anybody else has something to add, or perhaps even dispute (heaven forbid).