There’s a lot. I definitely could have chosen very differently and I’m not going to justify these choices. With so many channels and so much content on each of them available, I can’t possibly go through them all or even a meaningful number of them. Still, these are the ones I’ve somehow found.
I wanted to limit this to five, because I can sort of find five categories I wanted to cover. Maybe adding a writing channel would have been a good idea, because they often cover creating characters and worldbuilding, among other subjects, but I sort of felt that they were too close to the channels specifically for the GMs, even though they are not. Brain is a weird thing.
In no specific order:
Various curators and researchers usually show us a specific item and explain it’s context in history. Here’s a video on how to interpret Roman statues, specifically Nero:
Specifically Monstrum. While I do enjoy both It’s Lit and Otherwords very much, Monstrum is a show on different mythological creatures and sometimes cryptids. They are examined from the point of view of how these stories came about and what is the cultural signifigance of these creatures. Here’s some windigo:
There’s plenty of true crime shows, but this is the one I’ve chosen to follow for whatever reason. Simon Whistler is the face of about a dozen (I really don’t know how many) different channels and podcasts. He often calls himself Fact Boy mockingly. This is specifically about crime, usually about murder, because that gets the views. Whistler has a very unique approach, as he doesn’t read the scripts beforehand, but reacts to them live instead, realizing things as we are. Here’s their episode on my favorite serial killer (yes, I have one, you’ll see why):
Note: They did use the wrong picture. That’s Dagmar Overbye (just like it says on the image, actually), a Danish serial child killer. I don’t know why these two get mixed up so regularly, but I wonder whether that might be a mistake by the Google spiders.
An interesting look at religions. They tend to try to look at the religions specifically from the point of view of the people practicing it. After all, they might have very different perspective on the world as a whole, so they might not even see gods in the same way we see them from our modern viewwpoint. Here’s something on Hell.
The name implies specifically fall of civilizations, but they also go through the whole backstory. Why did the nation form specifically there? What were the circumstances? They sometimes go way too far to pad their videos (once they explained how gold is formed in stars as part of their Songhai episode, because the Songhai were preceded by the Mali empire, which had a loooot of it). Here’s their hour long explanation on The Bronze Age collaps: