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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   11053 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026

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The past is foreign country, and it is third world shithole country somewhere between Somalia and Zimbabwe. Not only the omnipresent hunger, disease, poverty and squalor, but values dissonance.

Accurate description of 100+ years old world would squick average modern reader after few pages. If you want full immersion into past, read unabridged and unexpurged works written at the time for contemporary readers.

Borgia vs The Borgias

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?

I am reminded of fanfiction. You can write an alternate universe where things happen that didn't happen in the source material. You can also make a mistake and write fanon--things that people think are true about the work, but really aren't.

Every so often someone writes a common piece of fanon, gets called on it, and claims that that's okay because they are writing an alternate universe. Or even admits the fanon and says "well, I choose to make an alternate universe where this fanon is true".

I reckon that most people having rotten/missing teeth was mostly a 19th Century and 20th Century phenomenon, driven by the new availability of cheap sugar. Medieval people consumed little to no sugar, so their teeth were generally healthy.

Little sugar but much bread, and likely the bread was filled with substantial grit from threshing and milling.

They could grind them down or chip them. I somehow managed with a much more forgiving diet.

Yes, interesting little factoid (if it is a fact) I learned recently: Elizabeth I had bad teeth precisely because sugar was now the luxury, available, new, sweetening and cooking ingredient. Of course cooks went mad showing off what they could do with sugar, and of course everyone who could afford it loved to use it.

I get the point about clown pants, but going to the other extreme and having all your characters in black (fake) leather is equally bad. And that just exacerbates the problem, because if every show and movie has "communicating with the audience, dress them according to our values and tastes" costuming, that shapes the expectations of viewers, so you'll never get "in fact, bright colours and dyes meant high status" correct costumes.

There was this romantic potboiler/disaster movie from 2014 called Pompeii. Overall deeply mediocre. But one small detail that I really liked was that they made the soldiers uniforms a half-step between accurate Roman armor and modern black tactical body armor that you would see a SWAT team or special forces wearing. Not particularly period appropriate but it made the solders unusually imposing for a period piece, because your brain is subconsciously reading them like a modern military unit.

In my opinion, the old dramas from the 1950s and 60s did the best job of balancing historically accurate settings with modern expectations.

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.

Why would Ridley Scott make his movie slightly worse to correct the impression that the Vikings dressed like goths?

Because that leads to Christopher Nolan dressing Bronze Age Greeks like they're the Batman.

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