[ SECRET POST #4538 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #4538 ⌋

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

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 35 secrets from Secret Submission Post #650.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[fscom]

03. https://i.imgur.com/WEv9JPu.png

[(Anonymous)]

I hear ya. Unfortunately I think you're probably going to get a lot of idiots telling you how you're wrong though.

[(Anonymous)]

They're objectively wrong though

[(Anonymous)]

Yes. People knew the earth was round in many countries, many centuries before Columbus for a start.

[(Anonymous)]

two points here

One, I don't think you have to be surprised at the existence of racism or racist characters to dislike it, even in characters for whom it's historically realistic.

Two, I think there's a real danger of overstating the degree to which racism and other forms of bigotry actually were universal, and flattening them into a blanket norm, and that's a very frustrating form of historical misunderstanding. "Flat earther" is actually a good case in point, because a belief in a flat earth was not historically widespread among educated people.

[sparklywalls]

I would add to your comment that sometimes I do feel like people hmm "enjoy" the unpalatable elements of historical settings a little too much as well. Like, it's not necessarily about historical accuracy anymore. This especially seems to be the case whenever there's rape in historical fiction imo. Anyone who points out it seems to be over the top is met with "but that's just how it was! They have to show it to be accurate!" Do they *have* to though?

But I do get what the secret is saying in that moralising from a 21st century perspective can sometimes go too far. However, as you have pointed out there's a lot of commonly believed aspects (like flat Earth) that weren't as widespread as people think as well.

[(Anonymous)]

Anyone who points out it seems to be over the top is met with "but that's just how it was! They have to show it to be accurate!" Do they *have* to though?

That's another great point! Realism in historical fiction is a rhetorical, aesthetic, literary device that people choose to use or not use, not an iron law that has to be followed.

[(Anonymous)]

"but that's just how it was! They have to show it to be accurate!"

Yeah, funny how all those totally-historically-accurate rape scenes feature women with shaved armpits, isn't it...

[(Anonymous)]

A lot of the whole "things were terrible back then, especially for women" business is often very inaccurate as well. If male writers do that, it always has this smell of it just being an excuse to write women being tormented under the guise of faux historical accuracy. What baffles me is when femlae witers, especially proclaimed feminists, do this as well. Ladies, stop portraying women as those feeble, downtrodden victims throughout history! Women often had much more power than they're given credit for.

[feotakahari]

At the very least, there’s a distinction that can be made through the things slavers wouldn’t admit. One slaver who converted and became an anti-slavery advocate talked about how he’d “seen” the use of thumbscrews. Surviving documents from his time as a slaver indicate that he personally used them on children.

[(Anonymous)]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_flat_Earth

[(Anonymous)]

Columbus was wrong!!!!!!!

[morieris]

"I can't believe this guy in 1066 thinks the earth is flat!"

[(Anonymous)]

Aristotle is over-rated and Eratosthenes was a ponce.

[(Anonymous)]

Lol@U
Pretty much everyone in the 15th century who wasn't, like, a peasant farmer who never left their village? Knew the earth was round. The maths on that got worked out in 200 BC. Columbus was just a moron who thought the earth was was smaller than every mathematician in the world said.
(Also a genocidal piece of shit, but let's not talk about that now)

[(Anonymous)]

Yes. This.
I cringed so hard when I saw Columbus.

[(Anonymous)]

Oh no, I'm having flashbacks to that twitter thread where all the uneducated American racists kept claiming that Robert E. Lee *totally* didn't do anything wrong, and *everyone* in those days thought slavery was okay!!!

[(Anonymous)]

Truthers about abolitionists? Not surprised.

[feotakahari]

There was this book I read once where the main character was from . . . a thousand years ago, I think? And the book kept pausing for him to monologue about his beliefs as a person from a thousand years ago, or do things that would be horrifying by modern standards. And I got the point the author was trying to make, but the actual plot wasn’t about life a thousand years ago; it was about him interacting with aliens. All the “people a thousand years ago had horrifying beliefs” stuff felt like filler.

[(Anonymous)]

I hate it when people put in current (and usually local) versions of racism/sexism/whatever and claim that they have to because it's historically accurate! No!

[(Anonymous)]

The late great Carl Sagan had a very good explanation of how the ancient Greeks figured out that the Earth was round in his book Cosmos (companion to the identically named TV series).

Whenever I encounter the idea that Europeans invariably thought the Earth was flat, my mind goes back to that Bugs Bunny cartoon where Columbus is debating if the Earth really ever was flat or round.

Guess which reference is more popular when trying to figure out belief systems in the Middle Ages? (Me, being excessively sarcastic.)

[(Anonymous)]

Henry VIII probably wasn't a flat-earther, although he probably did in witches.

Columbus's argument wasn't that the Earth was round, it was that the Earth was small and India could be reached using 15th-century European ships without critically necessary stops for water and food.

[(Anonymous)]

Henry VIII probably wasn't a flat-earther, although he probably did in witches.

And believing in magic qua magic (in some form or other) wasn't even necessarily that unreasonable, given the evidence available and the intellectual theories of the day.

[(Anonymous)]

Aside from the flat-Earther thing not being true, there's another fallacy here that I'd like to point out in that before about the Elizabethan era, race did not exist as it does now. It had nothing to do with your skin color and everything to do with where you were from. The Irish are a good example of this- when Britain colonized Ireland, the Irish were seen as a barbaric people, and that bad attitude has stuck around even through today. Someone from a pre-Elizabethan period would not recognize our skin-color based racial system, so using the "time period" as an excuse for someone to be shitty toward a person of color was not a thing.

(Disclaimer: I'm not a historian, just remembered this an an interesting tidbit I learned while combing through scholarly sources on Elizabeth I in college. If someone else has more info, by all means.)

[(Anonymous)]

Of course ethnicity is primarily a cultural construct. West Africa and East Africa are even more distantly related in genetics than Scandinavia and East Africa. In the United States, "Black" is constructed around the politics of Reconstruction, while "Asian" was constructed around the ethnic politics of immigration and labor in the last 19th century.

But we know from Shakespeare that his audiences had stereotypes of Moors and Jews. We know from historical records about Romani ghettos. We have folk songs from the period treating Moors, Jews, and Saracens as enemies and fools. So its likely that Elizabethans were hella racist, but that racism was likely shaped by the politics of Renaissance trade and the Protestant Reformation rather than the politics of Reconstruction and Manifest Destiny as they are in the United States.