They could grind them down or chip them. I somehow managed with a much more forgiving diet.
I was just rewatching (and complaining) about Wolf Hall Season 2 because of its addition of black guards and a black sister for Jane Seymour. It led me into a search for Tudor fiction where I learned the deep hatred of Philippa Gregory by Tudor history fans (apparently the Woodvilles really were witches, go figure).
But it was also pointed out that that's a feature not a bug. We know the story of the Prince in the Tower. It's just depressingly mundane, which is why we want it to be anything else besides the obvious. We know how it ended for Anne Boleyn. If Gregory wants to tell a story where these women gained agency by being witches or femme fatales is it the worst thing in the world?
Thirdly, and most importantly, historical fiction doesn't have to be written this way. If you want to change the outcome of a historical event because it makes your story better, you can write in a heavily inspired parallel universe like Guy Gavriel Kay, who has El Cid go down fitting Muhammad ibn Ammar in the Lions of Al-Rassan and Belisaurius becoming Emperor after Justinian in The Lord of Emperor's. You can also can be entirely truthful: Javier Moro's El imperio eres tú has biographical levels of accuracy on the life of Pedro I of Brazil, but reads like a novel. You can even make up your own characters, like Bernard Cornwell does in his Saxon Tales series and use the historical setting as a backdrop of what would otherwise be a fantasy novel.
Ah, but what if I, median viewer, don't want the real story (nor do I want to be told a story in a different timeline). "Richard did it" is boring and is the first thing anyone thinks of. I want something new and interesting that could be what happened!
If you're into straight history it can hardly be more accessible (especially European history obviously). Sometimes we don't want history though, it's often disappointing. We want a story about it.
It's hard to know how much to blame writers when they expect that you can just find the real story on your own time. In practice, yes, fiction often informs our views but at what point are the public to blame for that? Hillary Mantel is clearly reacting to a certain view of Cromwell and More. But she's clear that she's writing historical fiction.
That's kind of where I'm at with it. It's hard to come up with a line on historical realism because we will not reward writers for being historically accurate. The public may even laugh and dismiss you for violating their assumptions about what the world was like in the past.
But I draw the line at black Tudors. The difference there being that it's a clear top down imposition from the BBC not done to serve some story-telling purpose.
In a real historical piece, if they tried to make everything slavishly right any show would be unwatchable, because there would be too much that the audience couldn’t understand. The audience would be constantly distracted by details like un-filmably dark building interiors, ugly missing teeth, infants being given broken-winged songbirds as disposable toys to play with, crush, and throw away, and Marie Antoinette relieving herself on the floor at Versailles. Despite its hundreds of bathrooms, one of Versailles’ marks of luxury was that the staff removed human feces from the hallways regularly, sometimes as often as twice a day, and always more than once a week.
...
Even costuming accuracy can be a communications problem, since modern viewers have certain associations that are hard to unlearn. Want to costume a princess to feel sweet and feminine? The modern eye demands pink or light blue, though the historian knows pale colors coded poverty. Want to costume a woman to communicate the fact that she’s a sexy seductress? The audience needs the bodice and sleeves to expose the bits of her modern audiences associate with sexy, regardless of which bits would plausibly have been exposed at the time. I recently had to costume some Vikings, and was lent a pair of extremely nice period Viking pants which had bold white and orange stripes about two inches wide. I know enough to realize how perfect they were, and that both the expense of the dye and the purity of the white would mark them as the pants of an important man, but that if someone walked on stage in them the whole audience would think: “Why is that Viking wearing clown pants?” Which do you want, to communicate with the audience, or to be accurate? I choose A.
(The article then goes on to suggest "historicity" vs "historical accuracy": aka just pick your battles and try to maintain a history-like vibe)
It's pretty funny that the most pilloried Word of God from JK Rowling (well, maybe barring the declaration that Dumbledore is gay) is probably a result of her knowing the above fact about Versailles and just adding it to her world.
If the audience doesn't reward you for this and it actively harms their SOD, why do it?
When the big team owners in European football got together to propose a US-style European super league with franchise teams protected from promotion and relegation, the hardcore fans mutinied
This almost certainly would not have been enough. Everyone, including the other teams and the pundit class disproportionately drawn from those top teams, absolutely revolted. The Premier League in particular was started to seize more of the money for top teams without locking out the other teams needed for an exciting league, they saw the implications.
And the people who market European football think that the commitment of the (very local and traditional) hardcore fan base is part of the product they are selling to the Asian TV fans
Derby day is a big deal across the world even if you never set foot in Manchester or London and don't really have any of the proximity that made it so exciting originally. It's quite something.
Tanista
2d ago
Heck, it might actually be a good thing, since Cletus is dealing with all of that now, and his suffering is also an unalloyed good.
Mr Neather was a speech writer who worked in Downing Street for Tony Blair and in the Home Office for Jack Straw and David Blunkett, in the early 2000s. ... He said the final published version of the report promoted the labour market case for immigration but unpublished versions contained additional reasons, he said.
He wrote: "Earlier drafts I saw also included a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural.
"I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended – even if this wasn't its main purpose – to rub the Right's nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date."
Yes, it's a coordination problem.
But the issue is that there's no benefit to solving said problem. Why would Ridley Scott make his movie slightly worse to correct the impression that the Vikings dressed like goths?
Especially since the misconception may last precisely because it is of no great importance to anyone. People can find counterarguments to all sorts of sacred truths today...when they care.
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