[ SECRET POST #3238 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #3238 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 043 secrets from Secret Submission Post #463.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 1 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[(Anonymous)]

I once betaed for a friend who was writing a medieval-ish AU and she didn't want to bother with ANY research whatsoever. She just wanted the trimmings, even though it didn't really make sense and some of the stuff she thought was historically accurate was just... culled from romance novels and her own imagination. All of those details and mechanics of how the universe worked was getting in the way of her OTP smooshy time!

In the end, I didn't say anything. That was hard. :(

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[tabaqui]

Meh, yes. I totally get wanting fluffy fun-times with a knight in armor and a feisty peasant or *whatever*, but i really hate a story set in historical (Earth) times that utterly ignore actual *facts* of those times.

I just...don't enjoy reading those stories at all. I try my best to do as much research as possible on things that i *can* research, and freely admit when i fudge something for the sake of having the story actually happen. But man, i will *work* to make that 'fudging' happen as seldom as possible.

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[(Anonymous)]

I just...don't enjoy reading those stories at all.

Can I ask - serious question - why don't you enjoy it? What is the particular reason that you find it unenjoyable?

again serious question, just trying to understand where you're coming from

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[tabaqui]

Because, to me, a story is much more interesting and fun and satisfying to read when you can make your story work without hand-wavey exceptions or work-arounds.

(Perhaps one of the reasons most of Teen Wolf has irritated the bejeezus out of me. They ignore their own laws and lore, they forget what has gone before, they ignore realistic outcomes/fallout/consequences in favor of *story*!!, and because they do that, the stories just *don't make sense* and it really gets on my nerves.)

A really well-written story that fudge a few details or something is fine, but one that wants to have knights in armor diving into a lake and not drowning is just...meh. Or people riding horses *all day long* and then not feeding them anything but grass for a couple hours while they sleep. For *weeks*. Please - three sentences about grain rations will really help that! An aside by a character acknowledging they may very well kill their horses if they don't rest them would work wonders!

I'm not asking for an exhaustive treatise on long-distance trekking and horse care, but a nod to the fact that horses are ruminants who graze for *hours* to get the nutrition they need and can't actually go for days and weeks on nothing but a pile of hay at the end of the day.

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[(Anonymous)]

You weren't asking me, but since I feel the same as tabaqui, I'll give you my take on it as well.

I don't enjoy fluffy fun stories that pay zero attention to historical detail because if I can pick up on inaccuracies (and I'm not a scholar so if I notice a mistake, it's probably a big one), it interrupts my reading and I sit there and go, "Wait a second, that's not right..." It yanks me right out of the story I'm trying to immerse myself in. I'll never lose myself in the fic or book the way I want to because I'll be stopping every second paragraph and finding another mistake.

The other part of it is that it feels really, really lazy. Research has never been easier. You want to know what kind of breakfast rich people ate in Victorian times? You can Google it in like, ten seconds. So if I read a story where a Victorian family is sitting down to a hearty meal of Egg McMuffins, that annoys me. Authors who can't or don't spare the time for research aren't likely to invest the time to write a good story, IMO.

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[(Anonymous)]

ayrt - Same. I'm not a historian by any means so I figure my standards aren't that high. I just want things to look and sound mostly right in terms of historical details and I don't enjoy it if an author has clearly fudged everything (even really simple stuff) because I just feel... I don't know, cheated somehow. A great story with an eye for historical accuracy is a thing of beauty! Why don't more authors aim for this?

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[(Anonymous)]

That's great in stories where historical realism is part of the tone the author is aiming for.

But that's not what all stories are doing.

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, I suppose. Though if an author decides to set their story in say, Regency era England but isn't interested in even a semblance of historical accuracy... I'm not going to read those stories. I wish the authors luck, but I view such stories as being pretty pointless.

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[tabaqui]

Yes! If i'm promised an epic tale of pirates on the high seas circa 1740 or something, please don't give me inventions and language and events that happened in 1890! Or, gods forbid, 1900+. *Especially* the language! That's the worst.