(some very light spoilers from the early episodes of amazon’s “carnival row”, but don’t worry, no major plot twists here)
I love “carnival row” on amazon prime video, but I’ll admit it took me, a professional nerd, a couple of episodes to absorb the basics of this fantasy world. the show just drops you in and expects you to catch up, and it can be a little hard to do that when the only primer you’re given are these title cards at the start of the first episode:
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“For centuries, the homeland of fairies was a place of myth and legend. until the many empires of man came and fought for control of their riches. Seven years ago, this great war ended when the bourgeois republic withdrew, leaving the fairies to the iron fist of their rivals, the pact. now the homeland of the fairies is the hell from which they long to escape.”
That’s not much to go on, and it can be hard to get those proper nouns to stick in your brain just by reading that. so if you’re having a little trouble keeping up, it’s not necessarily because you weren’t paying attention.
but the universe of “carnival row” was developed quite well by the creator travis beacham while he spent more than a decade trying to make it happen. “carnival row” is not based on a book or comic or anything, so this is all original content. but the downside of that lack of outside source material is that we don’t have books that go into more detail about the world than the show that can help us understand the full context of the story we’re experiencing. this is not “game of thrones”, with all those long novels and encyclopedias that explain almost everything.
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Right now, we have two main sources of information about the world of “carnival row”: the show itself, and Amazon’s x-ray feature, which lets you read small bits of information about the scene you’re watching when you pause it. . . Because of this, there are huge gaps in our knowledge, but those gaps will eventually be filled: “Carnival Row” has already been renewed for a second season.
alright, let’s get down to business. As you probably know, most of the “Carnival Row” takes place in a city called Burgue, which is the capital of a country called the Republic of Burgue. the burgue is at the northern end of a continent called the mesogeo. To the east of the burgue, across the sea known as the great main, is the continent of tirnanoc. and beyond tirnanoc there is another continent called unknown.
okay, now that i’ve given a less than adequate physical description, you should probably take a closer look at this world map provided by amazon. you can click the image for a high resolution version.
There’s a lot of stuff on that map that we don’t know anything about. like the bay of monsters or the country called witchveldt. a lot of stuff here that teases some very interesting potential future stories. but the main thing for now to deduce from this is that the land to the west is the territory of the humans, and the land to the east is the territory of the magical people known as fae.
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At the beginning of the series, the text on the title cards talks about how the bourgeois and the pact are fighting over tirnanoc until the bourgeois decides to leave. the pact, mentioned many times but never explained, is just another mesogeo human nation, south of bourgeois. it is an alliance between the quivira and cibola countries, so it is the quiviro-cibolan pact. that’s all we know, and we wouldn’t even have known that much without that map.
“fae”, by the way, is a general term for non-humans. These include the fairies, centaurs, half-goat fauns, the trow, and the diminutive goblin kobolds. Not all fairies are from Tirnanoc: Centaurs are native to Mesogeo and were the dominant race in the Burgher-occupied territory before humans took over. fairies are like humans in that they have nations and all that. when “carnival row” starts, vignette (cara delevingne) is in a name, which you can see on the map there.
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OK, now let’s talk about the bourgeois. this country, which is the main power in the mesogeo north, has what is functionally a two party parliament, the commonwealth party on one side and the hardtackers on the other, with a chancellor at the top who has powers almost dictatorial.
chancellor breakspear (jared harris) is a member of the commonwealth party. the hardtackers were formed from the merger of various nationalist parties to form the main opposition party in the bourgeois parliament. hardtackers are racists who would rather see all goblins kicked out of the bourgeoisie. the bourgeoisie had been an imperial monarchy until 150 years before the events of the “carnival dilemma”, when an uprising installed parliament as the main governmental power on earth.
now the titular carnival row, originally a neighborhood called gloamingside, is a kind of ghetto for fae immigrants into the bourgeoisie. Finisterre Junction, on the other hand, is the upmarket neighborhood where the Spurnrose brothers (Tamzin Mercantile and Andrew Gower) and the faun Agreus Astrayon (David Gyasi) live.
There is a major religion in the bourgeoisie, as you will see while watching the show. it is the martyred faith, basically it is an analog of Catholicism, like the faith of the seven in “game of thrones”. We don’t know much about the details beyond that obvious parallel, but you’ll get a brief education on his doctrine over the course of the season.
The last big aspect of the world we need to talk about is magic. As with “game of thrones”, magic is not prevalent in everyday life in the bourgeoisie for most people. but magical events are important for “carnival row” events. a prominent character is a haruspex, who can see the future. this was not a natural phenomenon, at least for this specific character: he received that power by killing a previous haruspex when he was young.
This haruspex’s prophecies drive everything Lady Breakspear (Indira Varma) does throughout the season. And they also play an important role in the story of the main character Philo (Orlando Bloom).
other magical highlights we encountered: the mysterious creature known as a darkasher, which is created from the corpses of other creatures; and the curse of the wolf, which basically turns people into werewolves. it is also implied that fairies just casually use magic in mundane ways. perhaps that explains some of the cool anachronisms of the Victorian “carnival row” setting, like the elevated trains that run through the bourgeoisie.
As we explore more of the world in future seasons, there will be more that needs explaining, but for now, this is pretty much all you need for this cool new fantasy world.