fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #6404 ]

[ SECRET POST #6404 ]

⌈ Secret Post #6404 ⌋

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

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[Tell Me Why]

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Inspired by #6. Do you have any particular nitpicks that take you out of the story?

(As a disclaimer, yes, historical fiction doesn't always have to be realistic. Some people prefer realism or just have certain things that break their immersion).

Modern slang in historical settings, whether realistic or fantasy settings. I don't necessarily expect Tolkien-level language in all Middle Earth fics, but please don't use modern slang unless it is a modern AU. And no weird nicknames.

For published historical fiction, when the awfulness of distant past periods is so exaggerated. And when myths are portrayed as fact.

Edited 2024-07-18 23:58 (UTC)

Word up, Gandi-babes.

I know a fair bit about psychiatric history, and it really throws me off when characters talk about diagnoses that won't exist for many years, or in general when they talk about concepts like "madness" from a very modern perspective, instead of considering the meaning of the word in the historical context they're using it. Our understanding of mental health is very specific to our times and places. Not to say mental health experiences themselves are false, but that the way we group symptoms, name them, and understand them is very culture dependent.

I know I'm being nitpicky because a lot of authors are just not thinking that deeply about this specific thing, but it does distract me.

I've seen stories that attempt to use fully modern diagnostic terms for stories set in the 1800s and... yeah, no. Even trying to describe them without using the specific term feels very modern, and portraying everyone as having modern attitudes about mental illness, sexual trauma, mental and/or physical disabilities... that's going to be a real stretch in an era where we KNOW how someone with a mental illness was treated, and the truth is very sad and not at all romantic.

Modern psychology in historical settings. They may have noticed the trends but they wouldn't say it like we do. They're going to say haunted by war, not "psychologically damaged" by it.

Also, historical disabled characters are not going around teaching people how to be accommodating to their disability unless they're the king and that will be less teaching and more demanding. A rando scullery-maid is definitely not going to be doing either.

Not quite the same but of a similar flavor, I ran into a fic that takes place in an alternate fantasy universe and they used September, October, and November. Pulled me out of the fic cause in this universe there was no Rome...

Lol, anon above you, we said something similar. I'm really interested in disability history so I often have nitpicks about how disability is portrayed in historical fiction too.

The one about month names, I actually don't mind, I kind of just assume it's "translated" and not actually called that, they just have a similar enough calendar or something. Idk, I can usually suspend disbelief for that for some reason.

Re: Historical fiction pet peeves

(Anonymous) - 2024-07-19 00:56 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Historical fiction pet peeves

(Anonymous) - 2024-07-19 02:37 (UTC) - Expand

Any time a female character says a corset is "hard to breathe in" or "hard to do anything in". Girl, you would've been wearing some sort of corset since you were 7 or 8 years old. You'd be as used to corsets as modern women are used to bras.

While I do agree, I think when set during the tight-lacing era, the sentiment is not altogether impossible.

I've been wearing a bra for upwards of three decades and they still annoy me, I go without one when I can. And I'm guessing they might lace corsets a lot tighter for a girl/woman of marriageable age than either an eight-year-old or a woman who has been married for a while.

Re: Historical fiction pet peeves

(Anonymous) - 2024-07-19 06:04 (UTC) - Expand

you sure? I thought corsets were only worn by girls past puberty.

Re: Historical fiction pet peeves

(Anonymous) - 2024-07-19 04:19 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Historical fiction pet peeves

(Anonymous) - 2024-07-19 07:44 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Historical fiction pet peeves

(Anonymous) - 2024-07-19 11:16 (UTC) - Expand

mythic retellings that have done no research into the setting of the period. this is especially bad with feminist greek/roman myth retellings.

Learning that the word "sibling" wasn't in use outside of scientific contexts until the early to mid 20th century has made a lot of historical fiction harder to read.

I just mentally translate it to "sib" which was in common use from Middle English onwards.

Re: the Regency era, it bugs me a little when people don't seem to understand that the social rules of etiquette were very different back then. Austen touches upon some of it, but doesn't explicitly list what they are because her audience already knew it. This is particularly true re: the role of women - for the upper class, a young, unmarried woman doesn't visit a young, unmarried man at his house. They don't correspond by letter unless they're related, or it's in secret (and then you have to work out how that's done). People communicated via letters and in-person visits, that was a near-daily part of your social life even if you were a homebody. Class structure was a lot more rigid. Going around calling people you don't know well by their first name generally wasn't done and might even be seen as an insult. This is particularly true if the two people were from different social classes, so a footman would not be calling the Duke of Such-and-such by his first name.

IMO, part of the fun of a Regency era story is working within those more stringent guidelines and how it changes the story and relationships, so when people don't bother to follow them at all, it just feels like a modern story with gowns and dances.

Yes! Medical stuff - inhalers for asthma were not a thing in the 1870s - or technology. WWII telephones were not small enough to fit into a pocket and not every house had one. Just stuff like this that throws me right out of a fic.

Oh wow, you'd actually seen examples of this?!

Re: Historical fiction pet peeves

(Anonymous) - 2024-07-19 19:14 (UTC) - Expand

I don't mind female characters potentially being written with more agency or power than a non-fictional counterpart may have been afforded, but I hate when a character's gender is treated as interchangeable or invisible within a setting where it probably wouldn't be. It's mostly apparent in video games that let you choose a playable protagonist (looking at you, recent Assassin's Creed. Those games clearly wanted the women to be canon anyway, and I think the writing would have been better if they didn't have to account for the male option).

The one that gets me is when a setting is actually written to have whatever type of historical bigotry, but one character is magically immune to it...? I think I get the idea of the power fantasy, but when only one character has a special, random pass to challenge the oppression of their setting it is jarring to read.

LGBTQ terms to describe someone in a same sex relationship. Even back in the 90s, we didn't have these new umbrella terms and even the TERM LGBT wasn't used until the early 2000s at the earliest. I remember being called a lesbian early into my hs years (1997-2001) and not understanding the term until someone else called me gay.

+1

I love learning about how people like me would have described themselves before my time, terms have changed a lot in my lifetime even. I feel really happy when historical fiction uses language people actually would have used in the setting. That said, I sometimes read it more like coming from the audience's POV, which sometimes works okay with historical fiction. And if it's a short AU fic or something, I can suspend disbelief for the purpose of the story. Definitely takes me out though, speaking as a queer fan.

LGBT was definitely used in the 90s as the umbrella term. I remember this, because my parents' old travel books would use "LGBT safe" to designate places that it was safe to be open. This could NOT have been any later than 1994 or so.

Re: Historical fiction pet peeves

(Anonymous) - 2024-07-19 08:39 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Historical fiction pet peeves

(Anonymous) - 2024-07-19 18:22 (UTC) - Expand

I don't know that I personally have seen any historical fiction fuck up this bad, but I've definitely seen it in fanfic and especially "historical" fantasy: New world crops (especially potatoes for some reason?) in the Old World before European colonization.

I might accept sweet potatoes because every time I assume those are references to yams or other starchy tubers I see another site or article or whatever saying no, Pacific Islanders had sweet potatoes pre-Columbus.

I mean, the Vikings made it over and if anyone else was gonna it was Pacific Islanders, but why would they only have sweet potatoes, not corn/maize or any of the edible nightshades?

And the only accurate thing about "pre-Victorians having Victorian customs and social mores" bs is I feel like the Victorians wrote like that about history, too.

Then again now people writing historical fiction sometimes have trouble picturing a pre-personal computer/internet world, so maybe it's just a common human thing to fuck up.

Re: Historical fiction pet peeves

(Anonymous) - 2024-07-19 15:58 (UTC) - Expand

White wedding dresses pre-Victorian times. Modern slang and expressions ("okay" is one of my major pet-peeves). Food and animals that didn't exist in a country/continent at the time (like racoons in Europe or horses in the US pre-colonial times).

Names! I can ignore it in historical romances since an author doesn't want to write 6 books with heroines named Mary, but otherwise give me men with then-unisex names like Meredith or Vivian, give me characters with then-popular names that are now uncool, etc.

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