Hey folks! I was traveling this week to give an invited talk at Western Michigan University, so I don’t have a blog post ready for you. That’ll also probably be the case for next week (where I will be at the annual meeting of the Society for Military History), though at least there I will have an abstract to let you see.
Now I am always reticent to post up the text of talks that are intended to be delivered live, because the genres are different, they rely on different kinds of delivery and they often aren’t footnoted and such for written publication. But in this case, I can do something a bit different, because the main parts of my talk for Western Michigan University were based around things that I’ve written (and in one case, something someone else has written) which you can read. So this is a chance to plumb the archives, in a sense and in so doing, basically ‘read along’ a version of the talk I gave which is rather ‘meatier’ than what I could have said in the 45-or-so minutes I had to speak.
The core of my talk was the concept of ‘historical verisimilitude‘ that I’ve riffed on here: the use of the appearance of historical accuracy, or a claim to historical accuracy in the absence of the real thing to market or promote something, be that something a film or show or game or what I have begun terming a ‘history influencer’ who makes history-themed social media content.
My initial example of this at work was the disconnect in Assassin’s Creed:Valhalla between the emphasis on visual accuracy and the catastrophic fumbling of other forms of historical accuracy, which you can read about in my “Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla and the Unfortunate Implications.” I then expanded on this example with a broader one from 2000’s film Gladiator and its initial battle scene, arguing that once again what was prioritized was visual accuracy because that gave the viewers the – incorrect! – assumption that ‘the research had been done’ on the rest, which you can read about in our series on “Nitpicking Gladiator‘s Iconic Opening Battle.”
I then jumped to example of this as a rhetorical strategy deployed by marketing, grounded in a critique of how George R. R. Martin (and the marketing team for Game of Thrones) has framed historical accuracy, using the Dothraki as an example of how this can go badly wrong and perpetuate quite nasty stereotypes about real peoples through the supposedly ‘realistic’ (in fact, deeply flawed) depiction of a fantasy stand-in for those people. You can read about that in our series on the Dothraki, “That Dothraki Horde.”
From there I transition into talking about this strategy used by the aforementioned ‘history influencers,’ with a contrast between how differences in platforms between YouTube and Twitter produced very different environments: where YouTube’s long-form video nature pushed a lot of content creators towards more carefully researched historical content which was often actually quite valuable (I particularly focused, and again this was very brief, on arms-and-armor and historical dress channels), Twitter’s emphasis on ultra-short micro-blogging produced a very different environment.
For the part focused on Twitter, I leaned quite heavily on T. Trezevant’s “The Antiquity to Alt-Right Pipeline” published in Working Classicists in 2024, which I think is one of the most revealing investigations of this particular space and the incentives that the post-Musk Twitter algorithm, which appears to openly and quite strongly prefer frankly bigoted or xenophobic content, created. From my own observations, while some of the accounts that push this particular, generally badly historically misinformed, version of the ancient past emerged in the pre-Musk period of Twitter, Classics Twitter largely held its own until the algorithm was slanted against them, making it all but impossible for a lot of good Classics accounts to compete for eyeballs.
And then I closed with a plea for greater engagement by historians in these online spaces, albeit with a caution that picking your platform is important. The fact that historical verisimilitude, the pretense of historical accuracy or knowledge, is so frequently used as a marketing tool speaks to the public’s desire for an accurate knowledge of the past. Folks want to know what the past was really like, but of course regular folks often do not have the tools to tell what is reliable, rigorous and careful history vs. what is not. So as historians, we need to be more present in these kinds of spaces (though we ought to pick our platforms; there is little point ‘competing’ on Twitter if the deck is stacked against you) to help folks find the accurate historical knowledge they are seeking.
And that, in an abbreviated form (or an enlarged form if you read all of the links as you went!) was the talk! Very grateful for WMU for inviting me out to give it. Until next week!
The movies always show the cars and clothes of their chosen period accurately, even when everything else comes from la-la land. (Cars: always. Clothes: maybe 18th century on up to today.)
Actually the clothes are often terrible. I’m a fan of a website called Frock Flicks, where experts in historical costumes rip apart the outfits the supposedly historical characters are wearing in films and TV shows. Very entertaining.
Another good channel about the accuracy (or lack of) of costumes in TV shows is
Karolina Żebrowska’s YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@KarolinaZebrowskax
I remember the FrockFlicks blog!
Many of the most successful pop history vlogs focus on things like costume, warships, or arms and armour studies which are marginalized in academia and have a small but passionate audience scattered around the world. Audio and video are really good at getting audiences right now but I don’t know how long that will last. Streaming video is so expensive and resource-intensive and putting ads next to video is not much more profitable than putting them anywhere else.
I think what is shown accurately (or at least, for what the attempt is made to do so) is a reflection of what the creators (writers, costumers, directors, etc.) are interested in. If they care about fashion, the fashions will be researched and aimed towards accuracy. If they don’t care, it likely won’t be,
[It’s a running joke in the Stranger Things fandom that fanfic writers will exhaustively research which songs came out in 1983 vs 1984 so all music mentioned in their fanfic is period accurate… and then have the Kids playing D&D 5e (published 2014).]
I have two questions, stemming from the discussion of verisimilitude in last week’s post:
1) How does verisimilitude play out when the point isn’t historical accuracy, and historical accuracy is rather beside the point? “Life of Brian” and “Jesus Christ: Superstar” both come to mind–certain aspects of history do come up in each, but each are more commentary on other things. “A Knight’s Tale” may be a better one. The movie is essentially a sports movie, something more akin to “Friday Night Lights” than “Gladiator”, and intentionally includes a variety of modern pop-culture references and behaviors. How much would lack of verisimilitude impact these sorts of stories?
2) How does verisimilitude play out with stories set in the future? I will grant that it will heavily depend on the type of story–“Star Wars” is space opera, whereas “The Martian” is ostensibly based on current research–but in general, how do you apply verisimilitude to a story where the thing hasn’t occurred yet?
As an aside, I’m increasingly glad I’ve avoided Twitter. I like some YouTube content–the living history stuff, where they show both the original documents and the activity (like cooking or rifle drills or the like). There’s also a lot of crappy history, but 90% of everything is crap. But Twitter….The idea of discussing complex topics via micro-posting always seemed stupid to me, and inherently biased towards extremely shallow understandings of pretty much anything.
Even at a very brief glance, neither Jesus Christ Superstar nor Life of Brian should make anyone expect they aim to be well-researched honest representations of what the past was actually like, so there’s no “versimilitude” problem with them.
The problem our host is speaking about is when a work appears to _promise_ greater than average historical accuracy — and then fails to deliver on the promise.
Yes, that’s correct. An important part of verisimilitude is what I term the ‘claim.’ If a work is not making a claim towards meaningful accuracy, then this isn’t a problem.
I can think of one notable exception to this! Blackadder never claims any real historical authenticity to my knowledge, but Blackadder Goes Forth is often used as a pop-culture reference point for the Great War
One thing that I’ve heard medieval historians say about “A Knight’s Tale” is that it basically translates the medieval attitudes toward tourneys into our terms (this is my summary of something I’ve seen mentioned several times). One might say that it isn’t historically accurate but it gets the “vibes” right. Perhaps the same sort of thing is going on with WWI and “Blackadder Goes Forth”.
@Michael I’ve heard similar things about the HBO Rome series. While the historical events themselves are garbled (especially the 2nd season which compresses what was intended as 4 seasons worth of events), it gets some of the vibes right: brightly coloured rooms, Octavian casually slapping a slave without pausing his conversation, the class divide between a soldier and a senator, etc…
This is in large part because, as I understand it, Blackadder Goes Forth embraces the pop-culture understanding of the war that already existed. It validates and confirms “lions led by donkeys” as the basic dynamic, and if you are an English-speaker that is probably how you remember the war.
The subtleties of military science and technology that explain how broadly speaking competent and well-intentioned generals (and also Luigi Cadorna 😛 ) could wind up getting their troops slaughtered by thousands again and again to no recognizable strategic gain… Those are lost on most people.
Indeed, Simon, I seem to recall a number of WW1 histories that begin by saying the Blackadder Goes Forth gives a wildly misleading view of the war.
And it seems to me that it does use the “details for verisimilitude” trick mentioned above.
“Lions led by donkeys” feels like an odd framing for Blackadder Goes Forth, when the titular character is distinctly trying to constantly get himself away from the front lines (and openly admits to having joined the British army at a time he expected to be fighting people who couldn’t shoot back), and soldiers who are enthusiastic about the war are depicted as buffoons.
“This is in large part because, as I understand it, Blackadder Goes Forth embraces the pop-culture understanding of the war that already existed. It validates and confirms “lions led by donkeys” as the basic dynamic, and if you are an English-speaker that is probably how you remember the war.”
Makes me glad that my main experience learning about WWI is inter-war military history publications, like Albion’s “Introduction to Military History”. Without WWII to compare WWI against, they necessarily had to take WWI on its own terms. An astonishing number of “They slaughtered troops for no reason” arguments vanish when you look at 1) the entire war, including other theaters, and how troops moved between theaters, and 2) the available counter-measures to trenches and artillery (or, more accurately, the total lack thereof).
” It validates and confirms “lions led by donkeys” as the basic dynamic, and if you are an English-speaker that is probably how you remember the war.”
No, actually, because, and this is not a nitpick, no English speaker remembers the war. It is 2026. All the ones who could remember the war are dead; all of them. What English speakers remember now is what they were told about the war or what they read about the war.
It’s interesting you quote “lions led by donkeys” because this is a quote that was famously fabricated by a notoriously dishonest man, the right-wing politician and pop history author Alan Clark.
That is absolutely a nitpick. “Remember” is the common term in English parlance for cultural awareness of something that is deemed to have a significance, and not limited as a strictly technical term for personal memory.
” “Remember” is the common term in English parlance for cultural awareness of something that is deemed to have a significance”.
No, this is not true. It would not be normal for a living English speaker to say “I can remember the Battle of Waterloo” meaning “I am aware of it”. In fact it’s common to say something like “I’m too young to remember the 1992 election”.
@ajay, Isator is right and “remember” is used informally, especially in spoken conversation, as a shorthand for what someone knows about a subject without looking things up .
I can say, or write online, “I remember that Harold Godwinson was killed at the battle of Hastings” and most people won’t think I’m claiming to be over a thousand years old or reincarnated. My friends won’t think it strange if I ask “what do you remember about the battle of Waterloo?”. (Well, they might think it’s strange that I’m asking about Waterloo, but the question itself makes sense.)
The original comment by Simon_Jester would raise some eyebrows in an academic journal article, but in context it’s fine. As Bret sometimes reminds us, charitable interpretation is best.
Yes, nobody says “I remember the Battle of Waterloo”. They would say “we” remember it, with we standing in for general communal and cultural memory.
Like, the term for the day to commemorate the end of World War I is Remembrance Day. Imagine going up to a ceremony of that and saying “um, actually”.
I think it’s certainly correct that the key responsibility for writers is not to make false claims of accuracy, but there’s perhaps an interesting conversation to be had over whether there’s a (somewhat weaker) responsibility to go further. I raise this because audiences are still capable of forming false impressions about the past from works that don’t pretend to full historical realism. For example, ‘Wonder Woman’ evidently doesn’t take itself too seriously as historical fiction, but I imagine many viewers still came away with the idea that “obviously I know that all the stuff with superheroes and Greek gods isn’t real, but I assume the underlying backdrop of WW1 politics and trench warfare is basically true to how it really was.” Or at least, if they assume that some of it is accurate and some not, they aren’t really given any tools to distinguish between them. The question becomes: is it the audience’s responsibility to figure out for themselves what’s real and what isn’t (so long as writers include a few caveat emptor signposts that the work can’t be treated as a documentary), or is it the writer’s responsibility to only deviate from historical reality when it’s important for specific artistic effects (e.g. including supernatural elements in genre fiction)?
I think this hits the nail on the head.
Historical verisimilitude is harmful, not because something is shown on screen (or in game, or in text) that’s inaccurate, but because the audience uses it to construct a mental model of historical accuracy. In other words, it’s less about the content itself, then the way the consumer interacts with it.
Certainly, the author has some responsibility, especially for the aspect of their work that is presented as historically accurate. But the audience also needs enough media literacy to not take fiction at face value. This is further complicated because even if you know something is not an accurate representation of reality, merely seeing it can seep into your mental view of the past subconsciously. Interestingly this is a very well studied thing in medieval history – called medievalism – with its own historiography. I don’t think it’s so well studied (or even named) when it comes to antiquity; probably because our culture is far more saturated with medievalism fairy tales, legends, and fantasies than with antique ones.
The role of history outreach / pop historian in combating the harm of verisimilitude thus seems to fall into four complementary tasks:
1) Encourage / pressure / make resources available to creators such that their works are more accurate (while accepting that storytelling often has higher priorities that may clash).
2) Criticize publicly authors who make unwarranted claims of historical accuracy.
3) Teach audiences to take any depiction of history in any media with a grain of salt. A good rule of thumb is to assume it’s all false, and be pleasantly surprised when some of it is correct.
4) Provide a more accurate view of the past to replace incorrect mental models that inevitable seep in via media.
None of these can be achieved perfectly (because they compete with other legitimate or unavoidable forces), so all four need to be done for maximum effect. I haven’t heard out host delineate things this way, but this blog very clearly does all of these points! The only one that is perhaps not explicitly sign posted and has entire series dedicated to it is (3), perhaps because there isn’t all that much to be said there without going into the other points by way of examples.
I would say that 3) is far less tractable than the rest. Namely, it runs counter to the whole concept of “suspension of disbelief” and the related fantasy&sci-fi convention of “real unless highlighted as fictional”.
A work can’t depart from the writer’s reality too much without resulting in the characters having goals, constraints, solutions, and ways of thinking so foreign to readers that they fail to engage. This doesn’t even require fictionality as such. A(n anti-) romance about an agunah would hardly resonate with the overwhelmingly secular public. Or, admittedly with the fictional story of Hamlet as subject, but this is such a perfect illustration of the principle: Shakespeare in the bush.
So, although a sci-fi author may be intellectually interested in exploring the concept of “genetic memory” (ahem), i.e. that some aliens use the same substrate for storing genetics and personal knowledge/memories, therefore don’t have separate words (or concepts) for “talk” and “have sex”, and have good introspective access to how their genetics work, the ability to fix errors, etc., and what social structures result, and indeed there is a type of nerd (including me) who …is more interested in the worldbuilding than “the story”, this is a tiny audience.
Correspondingly, a historicizing fantasy author can:
– really know his stuff;
– mark lots of things for unreliable information or extraordinariness within-universe, e.g. how in LotR, sensible hobbits treat elves as legendary rather than “real”, how there are in-universe common misconceptions about extremely basic facts regarding Dwarves, or (again) how characters outright say that they didn’t believe that Mumakil exist (this approach is probably inapplicable to things that are starting background knowledge for PoV characters, exactly where most of these problems are);
– default to writing a story “twenty minutes into the past”, mixing dragons with late 20th century middle-class peasants (or late 20th c. upper-middle-class nobles), and by the conventions of the genre this is just normal to (indeed expected by) the readers. Who (vicariously?) experience that, apart from the dragons, the past is just like the real world.
As they say, the past is a foreign country: they speak English with an accent, they wear funny hats, they are so poor they use horses instead of cars, and sometimes they are so extremely poor that some other characters are illiterate (but never the PoV characters). If the plot requires for the PoV gang to be unable to read something, it needs to be written in arcane (either a foreign language, or a dense technical jargon/notation they teach at Wizard Uni).
@Basil, thank for Shakespeare in the Bush, that was a great read.
I disagree that (3) runs counter to “suspense of disbelief”, rather, I think that’s the whole point of the phrase! You know that something in the story is not real (the “disbelief” part) but for the duration of the story you chose to ignore that knowledge (the “suspense” part) in order to enjoy the it. There is no contradiction here.
If you earnestly think that details in the story are as true in the real world as in the fiction, then there is no disbelief to suspend. The point of historical verisimilitude, as defined on this blog, in fiction is to reduce the amount of disbelief that the audience has. The less disbelief, the less suspension is necessary, and the easier it is to be immersed in a story and to enjoy it. But a high degree of disbelief (including knowledge of historical inaccuracies) does not preclude suspending that disbelief.
Perhaps suspension of disbelief is a rarer art than is commonly held: pedantic fandoms try to dot every i and cross every t, and everything that deviates from our reality is framed as being in a different universe where the rules are different and it is real in its own way. That is very different from being able to acknowledge that something is not real, but accepting it as true within the context of the story but not beyond it. Or simple recognising an internal contradiction, filling it away where it doesn’t bother you, and moving on with the story.
To go back to the Bush, I can enjoy Hamlet even though I don’t believe in ghosts. Unlike the elders of the Tiv, I do not need every element of a story to align with my understanding of reality. Fundamentally, that’s the difference between fiction proper and true stories.
“I think it’s certainly correct that the key responsibility for writers is not to make false claims of accuracy, but there’s perhaps an interesting conversation to be had over whether there’s a (somewhat weaker) responsibility to go further.”
Yes, exactly!
Take the movie “300”. Even within its own context it does not presume to be presenting an accurate depiction of the battle. The whole framing of the movie is that this story is a propaganda piece being used by Sparta (via being told by the one-eyed Spartiate that left the battlefield under orders) to rally the rest of Greece. As such, we should expect as much accuracy as any other propaganda piece or story intended to make one’s group look bad-ass: Enough realism to not be totally laughable, but no one expects an accurate report, they expect a story. Exaggerations, things the story-teller can’t possibly know, out-right lies are all acceptable in this if they serve the purpose of the story (which, remember, is to raise an army against Persia).
In other words: There is precisely zero reason to believe that any facts in the story are true. Even within the context of the film accuracy intentionally takes a back seat to story-telling.
If we take the view that we can only assess verisimilitude if the author makes a direct claim to historical accuracy, the ENTIRE SERIES on this blog assessing the movie is invalid. Bret was arguing against something the author never intended and thus Bret’s entire argument is void.
Obviously that’s wrong. Obviously the discussion was edifying, entertaining, and important given the current infatuation in some circles with Sparta. So, equally obviously, we can dismiss the idea that the author must make some assertion of accuracy in order to assess these things.
I think the key is whether the audience accepts the thing as factual. Far too many people DO accept “300” as being reasonably accurate, at least as far as Sparta is concerned. Just like people build their perceptions of the past by what they experience in popular entertainment–“Gladiator”, “Rome”, and yes, “Life of Brian” and JC:SS (to differing degrees). The author need not make the claim; in fact, the author may object to the story being taken as accurate. It’s audience perception that’s the key factor here. After all, authors say stupid garbage all the time; most of it gets forgotten in the dustbins of used book stores. The stuff that sticks in the audience’s head is the stuff that matters. That’s the stuff that influences culture, that influences policy, that influences how and even if wars are fought.
If the author claims accuracy, obviously the bar is higher. If you claim to have done your research, you have to, well, have done your research, and it’s fair to point out errors. But even if the author doesn’t make the claim it’s fair to criticize failures of accuracy (understanding that these don’t necessarily make the story bad) if those errors become accepted as truth by the audience.
> But even if the author doesn’t make the claim it’s fair to criticize failures of accuracy (understanding that these don’t necessarily make the story bad) if those errors become accepted as truth by the audience.
I’d make the subtle difference that, when the work neither explicitly nor implicitly presents itself as factual, it’s fair to point out the inaccuracies for what they are (which is different to criticising them per se), and to criticise the parts of the audience (including secondary media) that interprets those inaccuracies as fact. Of course, it’s rather hard for a blog to maintain an audience while telling it’s readership that they’re doing something wrong; much more polite to shift the blame entirely somewhere else. As I said above, all parties are involved in this, even when deliberately viewing something as fiction, some of it will change your mental model of the past despite your intentions to reject it.
@Dinwar,
Right, I think that we tend to implicitly accept historical fiction as, well, historical, when it’s done well enough and with enough attention to detail, *even when the author explicitly says that it’s fiction*. I think this can happen inadvertently and implicitly, and in some cases quite contrary to the author’s intention.
IMO a key question when considering the “unreliable narrator” defence for inaccuracy is basically “how much does this work demonstrate alternatives to that unreliable narration?”
In 300, the answer is pretty much “not at all”. The narrator is just a framing device, at no point does the movie undermine or contradict his presentation, so even though you can read the in-story version of the film as a false/exaggerated account, you’re given no basis to evaluate if or how it’s been exaggerated. The audience isn’t really to blame for taking this stuff at face-ish value, because that’s the only perspective the movie gives them.
Imagine instead a different version of 300, which interleaved sequences told from the perspective of the original narrator with sequences told from the perspective of e.g. a Persian historian, showing the same moments differently. Then there would be a much stronger defence against complaints regarding the realism/accuracy of the Spartan propaganda segments.
@Tea Kew 300 has ludicrously oversized elephants, magical hand grenades, and a goat headed woman playing the flute. If the viewer can’t read these clues to infer that at least some of the events depicted are not true to life, then they’re at least partially to blame. Whether you call this unreliable narrator or straight up fantasy, it’s very obvious signposting that the film is not 100% accurate. What’s not clear to a viewer without sufficient background is how far this historicity extends to other elements of the story.
Part of the problem is that there is a very wide range of sophistication (from ‘high’ to ‘zero’) in how readers interact with published content.
Some people go through high school and college and come out very ready to carefully tease out contradictions from within a story, cleverly identifying the specific details that prove that the narrator is unreliable and reading between the lines that maybe events did not take place as the narrator describes.
Some people go through high school grudgingly, hammering out a C in the relevant classes mostly by dint of “doing extra credit” which the teacher gave them to make the parents stop breathing down their necks, and never get the hang of reading text critically. Everything they understand about a work is from either the literal as-spoken words on the page (and probably not even those) or from them bringing their own prejudices and biases to the reading.
The people in those two categories are going to be having very different experiences when reading or watching something like 300.
If Snyder was trying to tell us the Spartans were cool, I would say he succeeded. If he was attempting the reverse message, I feel he failed quite profoundly.
“The audience isn’t really to blame for taking this stuff at face-ish value, because that’s the only perspective the movie gives them.”
I disagree.
First, the movie does break in–frequently–to remind you this is a dude telling a story. The voice-overs serve the purpose. This is not a subtle movie, and the voice-overs are as unsubtle as the rest of it. You may argue it’s insufficient, but my response is going to be where exactly you put the goalpost, because it seems to me that by any reasonable standard the movie met the requirements.
Second, once you accept the movie as propaganda in-universe any reasonable person should question how real the story is. This IS NOT necessarily bad! Ukraine has done a fantastic job at propaganda throughout their current war–which is as much to their credit as their use of any other weapon of war. But it’s worth asking, when watching videos coming out of Ukraine, what else is going on. Russia is more like Sparta here: You can’t make up battles, but you can twist the facts in your favor (and remember that this Battle of Thermopile has always been distorted into a heroic act, rather than the abject failure it was). Either way, once you see the start and end of the film “300” (remember, those are the most important moments), belief that the story is factual becomes untenable.
Further, the framing device itself causes problems with truth. A really good example of this is LOTR. Remember, Tolkien was pretending that LOTR was an ancient text he discovered and was translating; it was the Red Book that Bilbo, Frodo, and Sam wrote. Which means that any scene that the Hobbits of the Fellowship weren’t directly witnessing can be treated as highly speculative. Common enough in ancient texts, but it does mean that there are parts of LOTR that are necessarily untrue in-universe, by the story’s logic. I’m a huge LOTR fan, by the way, so I’m certainly not saying that this sort of thing destroys a story. It just absolutely must give the audience pause and demands that we carefully consider what’s true, what’s exaggerated, and what’s flat-out false.
I haven’t seen 300, and have seen Lord of the Rings. I think one’s experience of fiction is that narrators default to reliable, unless you catch them being unreliable. (I’d cite Wayne Booth’s books Rhetoric of Fiction and Rhetoric of Irony, which examine the questions at length.) After all, the diegetic reality we see doesn’t exist beyond what the narrator relates to us so the only way in which the narrator can be inaccurate is if they contradict themself. One is reacting to the narrator’s story, not to some sequence of events independent of the narrator. Or to put it another way, the possibility that the narrator is unreliable is empty unless the text gives one materials to build possible more reliable accounts. Incidentally, given a choice between the claim that the Lord of the Rings is the Red Book and the claim that the narrator of the Lord of the Rings is not omniscient (in the narrative sense), I think one has to reject the former. There’s no sign that Tolkien tried to implement the idea of a translated history in how he told the story.
Works have to be popular, to sell. Written works may be merely imperfect but cinema and television live or die by merciless ratings pressure. I would have to presume that no visual work is accurate until vetted.
“There’s no sign that Tolkien tried to implement the idea of a translated history in how he told the story.”
Nonsense. There’s loads of evidence for the conceit of translation (which is what I’ve heard it called in Tolkien research). To give a brief list: The inclusion of the preface (“Concerning Hobbits”) and appendixes is evidence. The reason the writing style changes at various points is evidence. There are multiple points where phrasing is included that only makes sense in the context of a translated work (such as parts of the Council of Elrond; the introduction to the Council itself is basically a citation of the Silmarillian). The inclusion of the songs is based on how many ancient European texts were written.
More importantly, Tolkien flat-out said it was what he was doing, repeatedly and consistently. I get the whole “death of the author” thing, but at the point where the author says “I’m doing X”, the statement “There’s no sign that the author was doing X” is untenable.
I will grant that some of this can be subtle. We’re talking about a guy who made puns that require knowledge of three languages, one of which he made up, to really understand; LOTR is a very subtle book. But it’s simply, factually untrue that there’s no sign that Tolkien did this.
I think people are approaching this with a degree of media literacy that is unlikely to be shared by the folks we’re concerned about absorbing these ideas.
Broadly, I don’t think all that many people watching 300 (or even LoTR) are sitting there thinking ‘well, this is depicted from the perspective of an unreliable narrator, so I should probably take the historical accuracy of this work with a pinch of salt’.
Personally, I think this plays out in a complex way though. People generally don’t seem to watch 300 and come out thinking ‘this is exactly what ancient Greece was like’. However, I do think people will absorb a fair amount of the tone or perhaps messaging that 300 puts across. Not that the Spartans were literally diving around the battlefield avoiding magical firebombs and fighting weird mutated supermen. But stuff like ‘Spartans were awesome fighting machines, and being an awesome fighting machine is an important thing to be’ and ‘Persians fit in that oriental-exotic-weird-other box in comparison to the one-of-our-lot Greeks’. You might find some other stuff sneaking past the internal censors like ‘Spartans were all ripped’ and things like that.
It’s hard to tell just how extensive that sort of ‘understanding leeching through by osmosis’ is, but considering the public perception of various different time periods (‘The Dung Ages’ medieval for instance), I’d suggest that it’s fairly pervasive. My sense is that the conceit of the unreliable narrator is useful for people who would have gone and researched this stuff anyway…but they’re not really the folks we’re concerned about.
Verisimilitude is essentially about suspension of disbelief, and suspension of disbelief is an unspoken agreement between creator and audience. The creator makes a promise to the audience through a mixture of genre labels, advertising, and the content of the work itself.
A Knight’s Tale isn’t pretending to be historically accurate, but they don’t introduce someone riding a Harley-Davison half-way through either. That would break the film’s promise of jousting-in-the-style-of-modern-sport. The filmmakers went to a lot of trouble to make the lances break dramatically in order to create the impression of people on horseback hitting each other very hard with wooden poles. That’s the verisimilitude.
The Martian promises audiences a tale of human ingenuity and scientific knowledge overcoming an deadly situation. The film wouldn’t work if he got superpowers halfway through, or if Matt Damon’s acting didn’t sell the danger to the audience. They made sure the scientific/engineering content was as plausible to a general audience as possible.
Now, you can make films with motorbike jousting, or astronauts getting superpowers, or people being completely unconcerned about their own impending doom. But you’d have to rebuild A Knight’s Tale or The Martian from the ground up if you wanted to make them work.
I’ll also add, from an authorial pov, verisimilitude is generally about patching over the cracks. Sometimes implicitly, often explicitly.
The most grounded stories you can think of require an absurd number of coincidences to make the plot work. Casts are artificially small, time is compressed, chains of causation simplified. Even the way people speak in fiction is highly artificial. No one ums or ahhs or repeats themselves unless it’s plot significant.
By making an ostentatious show of realism in another area (for instance, costumes and sets), the creator draws the attention of the audience away from the artificial parts.
Though I do note that absurd coincidences happen all the time. Stories are in a weird place in that sense: They’re generally absurd and has to have a certain amount of buy-in that reality doesen’t have to bother with.
“…but they don’t introduce someone riding a Harley-Davison half-way through either.”
The movie starts with a Queen song. So in a way, they kind of do.
It works because it tells the audience that historical accuracy isn’t the aim–they’re going to pull bits and pieces from a variety of times in order to tell the story they want to tell. This allows us to accept things like a guy getting the equivalent of newspapers and reading the sports pages, or dances that were very much not Medieval, or armor that was….well, it was certainly there, and looked vaguely like armor. Starting out with “We Will Rock You” and having everyone in the scene participating calibrates the audience expectations, telling us to focus on the story because the historical facts aren’t really important.
That said, people still accept the things they have been exposed to as accurate. “A Knight’s Tale” does better than many movies, but it still shows the Middle Ages as horribly drab and dirty, for example, a view that reenactors and historians continuously fight against. The movie is also about the upper class–note the lack of farmers (and what poor people are shown are of the “stupid, dirty, slovenly” type)–which perpetuates a lot of really bad ideas about the past that have real implications for today.
I never really got the impression that the Queen song at the start of the movie was strictly diegetic. It has a bit of fun with the presentation by showing a few extras mouthing along with the lyrics or clapping in time with the beat, but I still think that’s mostly a mood setter. The film does not otherwise act as though people are literally playing Queen songs.
The only other thing in the entire movie that is directly conveyed as a deliberate anachronism is when the dance scene after the first tournament goes from “something that at least resembles Medieval style” to “much more modernistic in keeping with the soundtrack”. That’s one where I’m less sure if the dancing is coming across as non-diegetic, but it’s still a very confined moment in a film that otherwise seems to be playing the subject matter straight.
All other uses of modern music in the film are pretty clearly not diegetic. Nobody is literally hearing Thin Lizzy play as they travel back to London.
Opening scenes in the movie are incredibly important–they set the tone for the movie. I find it difficult to imagine a director opening a Medieval movie with the cast singing a modern rock anthem without intending it to contribute to setting the tone. Even if it was the director just having a bit of fun, it still serves the purpose. It says “This is a fun movie, not an accurate one.”
As for deliberate anachronisms, there are plenty. How many female blacksmiths do you think there were in the Middle Ages? I’m sure there were a few, but we’re talking fractions of fractions of a percent and they absolutely would not have been accepted AT ALL. The religious discussions were in line with the time, but not NEARLY sufficient–remember, religion even at that late stage of the Middle Ages permeated every aspect of life in ways that would be absurd to us today. The noblewoman saying that she’d be willing to give up her station to marry William is totally anachronistic–it violated the very foundation of how they viewed the universe, it would be exactly on par with a woman marrying a bear and living in the woods. People were elevated–the Prince’s elevation of William would have been rare, but not unheard of (it’s one reason why men went to war)–but being downgraded was something else entirely. The speeches were horribly anachronistic. Chaucer was played for laughs and entertainment, but the speeches were aimed at a modern audience, and would have been absurd if not blasphemous to a Medieval one (it relates again to the Ladder of Creation; these introductions were stereotyped and had specific formats). What we see of swordplay is…..not good. At all. Even by Hollywood standards. There were rules to such fights, including the weapons to be used, and this violates ALL of them.
That’s just the list I remember off the top of my head. I’m sure that if I re-watched the movie with the intent to spot them, I’d see far, far more. These are just the glaringly obvious ones.
Most of these are due to the target audience being modern people living in representative republics, and they serve the purpose of translating Medieval attitudes into a format modern viewers can comprehend. That makes them good choices from an artistic perspective. But they are the equivalent, in their area, of William riding up on a motorcycle.
“I find it difficult to imagine a director opening a Medieval movie with the cast singing a modern rock anthem without intending it to contribute to setting the tone. Even if it was the director just having a bit of fun, it still serves the purpose. It says “This is a fun movie, not an accurate one.””
The cast is not singing “We Will Rock You” (not least because no member of the main cast is actually present in that opening scene). Freddie Mercury is. It’s in the soundtrack, not being performed in-character. It is establishing the tone of the movie (and making some commentary on the similarity of Medieval to modern sports), but it’s not introducing that level of anachronism.
“How many female blacksmiths do you think there were in the Middle Ages? I’m sure there were a few, but we’re talking fractions of fractions of a percent and they absolutely would not have been accepted AT ALL.”
It is often brought up that the rules of most Medieval guilds permitted for the wives of tradesmen to continue the trade in support of themselves.
“The religious discussions were in line with the time, but not NEARLY sufficient–remember, religion even at that late stage of the Middle Ages permeated every aspect of life in ways that would be absurd to us today.”
Frankly I think the characters in this movie invoke scripture way more often than is typical even in more serious-faced cinematic Medieval fiction. If they’re doing it less than people realistically would, I would regard that as artistic licence for the sake of keeping it functional as a movie more than deliberate anachronism. Anachronism would be people being actively and vocally irreligious.
Hell, there’s a point where the main character says something mildly blasphemous, and his friend seems to be genuinely offended by that and retaliated physically. I would find that to be presenting the topic with more realism and depth than many others would.
“The noblewoman saying that she’d be willing to give up her station to marry William is totally anachronistic–it violated the very foundation of how they viewed the universe, it would be exactly on par with a woman marrying a bear and living in the woods. People were elevated–the Prince’s elevation of William would have been rare, but not unheard of (it’s one reason why men went to war)–but being downgraded was something else entirely.”
Again, I’d say more artistic licence for the romantic element of the film than anachronism. Even then, some scenarios that can be surprisingly close do crop up. Catherine of Valois was a former queen and a daughter of the king of France, Sir Owen Tudor was of far lower station and minor aristocracy at best. Somehow, they formed a relationship despite obstacles of not only class, but governing mandates against Catherine ever remarrying at all, and from them came a later ruling family of England.
“Chaucer was played for laughs and entertainment”
That one I’ll grant. The one thing in-character that notably delves into more modernistic language and presentation (if not content, he’s still going on about pilgrimage and heroism against Turks), and kind of mildly at that.
I think it’s indicative that the argument starts from a position of “characters are playing a modern pop-rock song” (which I deem to be incorrect anyway), and then has to almost entirely rely on nitpicking for strict historical accuracy.
This has long been my comment about “historical accuracy” in war movies, going back at least to “Saving Private Ryan” — that they will expend considerable effort upon things like getting the hobnails on the boots to be accurate, yet present a story that is patently ridiculous. Yes “Fury” I’m looking at you.
Man, ‘Fury’ is a bizarre film. Starts off with the potential to be a really interesting exploration of whether anyone can be a war hero when, instead of storming Omaha beach, you’re reduced to mowing down teenagers in a conflict that’s all over bar the shouting. Then the second half just lurches into nonsense tactics, macho chest-beating, and the unpleasant notion that the way to beat the Nazis was to outdo them in ruthlessness. A real waste.
Though “Fury” was a documentary compared to “Inglourious Basterds”, the latter being more or less a filmed comic book story depicting an alternate history.
True, but here’s where the issue of different levels of claimed accuracy comes in, I suppose. Inglourious Basterds’ ending (which anyone who has even a glancing familiarity with WW2 knows didn’t happen) is a strong signal that the film isn’t intended as reliable history, whereas Fury presents itself as a more grounded, realistic story. This makes me more sympathetic to the former, although it can still mislead (probably some viewers picked up the idea that there really were Jewish-American kill teams running round Occupied France, even if they weren’t as successful as depicted). Is it better to be 50% accurate while claiming 90%, or to be 30% accurate and claim that too?
I think it can be interesting to know how certain deviations become driven by the need to depart from reality to achieve a certain cinematic quality. Saving Private Ryan has a lot of credibility, but also wants its sniper character to have a particular role in narrative, and thus in the climactic battle. Hence, he’s able to be positioned in a clocktower that allows him to spot and signal and shoot throughout the fight and makes his death a dramatic turning point, whereas actual Wehrmacht tactical doctrine at the time would have had the tank shoot down that tower well before they entered the town specifically to keep it from being used for those purposes.
The algorithmic takeover of the internet is one of the most bleak and depressing phenomena of my lifetime.
I’m still struggling to catch up on the blogs and comments of the last four weeks, so a break is actually helpful.
I’m not sure you can actually infer an interest in a *factual, truth-seeking inquiry of the past* from a large demand of historical material. In my experience, people engage with history often not out of a genuine curiosity for the messy complexity of past lives and past events, but out of an effort to justify and reinforce existing beliefs about a broader palette of modern cultural practices.
This also occurs on both sides of the political spectrum (and I say this as a radical leftist and self-identifying postmodern Neomarxist, lest fellow left-wingers feel like portraying me as one of those execrably centrist fence-sitters) though of course it is most prevalent among those people whose ideas about society and life are so off putting to modern sensibilities that they strongly necessitate to be propped up by the false legitimacy of quotes from long-dead historical figures (whose opinions go unquestioned and unexamined, for the most part).
I think a genuine engagement with the past as the foreign environment it is all but requires to set aside the urge to use our fragmentary historical knowledge as a crutch to prop up our own ideas and justify our political positions, and that’s a big ask in today’s political culture.
@Tambourine, I’m genuinely curious about what Neomarxists believe in the 21st century. Where’s a good place to converse on this?
@Michael,
We’re coming from different places ideologically, but I’d be very interested in a conversation like that as well.
To me this is always most noticeable in any discussion or depiction of everyone’s “favorite”, the Spartans. The common view of the Spartans as some sort of noble uber-warriors completely overlooks their many military failings, not to mention the many loathsome aspects of their society.
“The common view of the Spartans as some sort of noble uber-warriors ” For a lot of those who make them favorites and go out for “Molon Labe” tats I don’t notice ‘noble’ aside from the wealth elite ruler cast part being very important to the fantasy.
I think it’s ‘noble’ in the sort of ‘suitably stoic of character and uninterested with things that aren’t manly pursuits’ conceptualisation of ‘noble’.
Not that that’s any more accurate (arguably even less so), but it’s worth noting that the perception of what is ‘noble behaviour’ differs between subcultures.
It occurs to me that an analysis of why people engage with history-related content would be valuable here. I’m reminded of one of the series on this site (the Fremen mirage, maybe?) where we reflected on what it meant for Roman writers to talk about the threats / virtues of barbarian society. There, of course, it wasn’t that the Roman writers seriously thought that they should understand and emulate societies apart from their own – they wanted to critique their own society by holding up an imagined ideal standard, and casting that ideal standard as a threat to their own society made the argument more compelling to their contemporaries.
In the same way, a work of mass media is just never really going to be about historical accuracy because there aren’t enough people interested in dispassionate investigations of history to provide a market for mass-media of that kind. But people are tremendously interested in our own day and politics, so there is a market for works which present the past as a way to comment on contemporary society. (As an aside, this could be an explanation for the phenomenon noted in the classics to alt-right pipeline article – maybe Twitter sees political and social commentary as a more valuable form of content than ancient history or the Latin language itself, so “history-commentary” accounts with fewer followers are promoted over “history” accounts with more followers?)
With regard to the question of versimilitude, this means there’s a more pressing problem than just implying “this part of the work is well-researched” = “that part of the work is also well-researched.” The bigger problem is the implied claim that a little bit of research means the piece’s commentary on contemporary issues is valid and worth taking seriously.
Of course these topics are related – if you want to draw meaningful parallels between the past and present then it helps to start with an accurate understanding of the past.
But I think the exhortation here should go slightly beyond “historians ought to engage online more.” Rather, it would be good to clarify that “historians ought to model how to responsibly use history to comment on contemporary issues.” I think that gets back to the heart of the challenge of versimilitude – it’s much easier to portray period-accurate costumes than it is to portray period-accurate attitudes and mores. And it also gets to the heart of why most non-history folks (who aren’t equipped to spot this problem) are interested in historical works in the first place.
I think there’s also an interesting question in to what extend actually accurate historical mores are desirable in a work of fiction. And I don’t just mean in the obvious way of crass and indefensible racism or misogyny that I don’t think many people will defend, but also in more subtle ways.
On this blog, Bret has often pointed out how most pre-industrial societies saw war as inevitable and thus considered societal belligerence a necessity and often even a virtue. Which is correct and right for the time, because in a pre-industrial society war is the best way to acquire wealth. But if we see fiction as trying to teach people correct behaviour to emulate, then in our post-industrial age, where war is a Bad Idea, then having a historically correct eager-to-war character is a disservice to the present.
Or an example I noticed pretty often when watching East Asian media: In historical stories, they treat the framework of Traditional Chinese Medicine as gospel, down to its ideas about incompatibilities and toxicity. On the one hand, this is accurate to the period – people would have thought in this framework and accepted conclusions reached from this framework. But from a modern perspective where despite the best efforts of the Chinese government, medicinal research has failed to support any of the predictions of TCM, this is not only nonsense but dangerous nonsense we shouldn’t expose kids to in case they want to emulate it. (One of the more egregious examples I came across was in a Korean series where a time-traveler from modern times is tasked to solve a poisoning and finds what at first appear to be rat droppings in the victim’s medicine. She’s understandably disgusted and suspicious of this, but a scene later she gets told these are actually bat droppings and therefore medicinal, and she just completely drops the matter.)
Western! I wish it had been on the other side of the state so I could have attended, if just to shake your hand. I hope my state’s weather didn’t put you off future visits!
I am not an apologist for Traditional Chinese Medicine by any means, but I believe your claim that no medical research supports it is an overstatement. There have been medical studies that show the efficacy of acupuncture, and there are more studies on the herbal side of TCM coming out now. See https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and-dentistry/auriculotherapy
(I’m Chinese, and my family has tried to push TCM treatments on me. I’ve resisted because I’m suspicious of the quality control of the ingredients and terrified of needles. But I know lots of people who have benefitted from acupuncture.)
No worries, it’s always hard to be precise in a short comment. My point is not that all treatments of TCM are ineffective, but that the underlying theoretical framework (zhangfu organs, yin-yang imbalance, elemental associations) from which the medicinal predictions (this cures that, this interacts badly with that) are derived is not supported by the evidence. The same way some of the medicinal herbs used in ancient and medieval European medicine turned out to be effective, but the Four Humours theory as to why is completely bunk.
@AlienSystem,
I think this is exactly right, yes.
>But if we see fiction as trying to teach people correct behaviour to emulate
Ugh, please god no. Everyone having to act like a contemporary New Yorker has ruined speculative novels during the past decade as far as I’m concerned. The didacticism is loathsome.
I get your reaction of “God no”, because nobody likes overly obvious didacticism and preaching in their stories, but that’s not the only way stories can express and thereby attempt to teach values.
Even that monumental work of speculative fiction that is The Lord of the Rings has values it wished to express. And as Bret pointed out in his PPP moot talk, these values are at odds with the stories that Tolkien was inspired by and tried to emulate in his writing. But because Tolkien is a good writer, he manages to work all his messages into the book without them appearing preachy, even when the characters are pretty baldly stating their moral stance and the narration makes clear that we are to take these stances as good because the character is wise. And if we look at Tolkien’s letters and other writing, we can be sure that this is intentional and that he was very much aware that he was making a case for his own moral values (which mostly meant Catholicism) in a way he thought was not grating to the reader.
And given that in the very comments of that thread, a heated discussion broke out about how a two-sentence excerpt about Aragorn’s wars of conquest after his coronation should be interpreted, this is not just theoretical. Because the question underneath the question of “Was Aragorn doing Imperialism?” is about to what extend therefore we should follow the book’s narration when it very heavily implies that Aragorn is an ideal king.
“Because the question underneath the question of “Was Aragorn doing Imperialism?” is about to what extend therefore we should follow the book’s narration when it very heavily implies that Aragorn is an ideal king.”
Is there any contradiction between being an ideal king and doing imperialism though? Alexander the Great, Cyrus the Great, Charlemagne, etc… did both, didn’t they?
You might have missed the part where Lord of the Rings has a different moral framework than the stories that declared those people Good Kings.
To put it in your terms: Do you think Gandalf the Gray would have been willing to help an Alexander, a drunkard who’d kill his friends over a badly judged remark, to regain his throne?
@Alien@System well if Gandalf knew what imperialism is and disproved it out of his progressiveness, then I would expect him to support democracy and equality between people than putting a guy on the throne to rule.
Destroying the threat (Orcs) to protect your people (humans) is one of the traditional expected duty of a king. Catherine the Great conquered Crimea to stop Tartar raids, Han Wudi conquered the northern steppe to stop Xiongnu raids, Trajan conquered Dacia, Marcus Aurelius go to war against the Germans… etc
So I don’t think Tolkien would have wanted Aragorn to do differently. He is the traditional warrior king stereotype. No reason to expect he to focus on something else like abolishment of serfdom or promote gender equality etc… in order to be an ideal king.
It also has to be remembered that once upon a time monarchy made sense. Being a king in Saxon England was a rather different proposition than being the King of France or Britain in the Eighteenth century. Whereas democracy wasn’t really possible above the scale of a polis or a council of burghers until fairly recently.
@nva,
One can be a reactionary monarchist (as Tolkien was) and still disapprove of imperialism- dissaproval of imperialism isn’t necessarily a “liberal” or “left” thing.
Alexander was also controversial in premodern times, even among peoples who hadn’t been his victimes (St. Augustine’s anecdote about Alexander and the robber comes to mind, although of course he includes it in the context of a polemical argument).
“But if we see fiction as trying to teach people correct behaviour to emulate”
That’s why fiction characters never curse nor do anything bad, because there are little kids in the audience.
Yes, well done. Your shallow refutation of the most extreme reading of the point I was trying to express in short form has completely obliterated the entire argument and therefore let’s all go watch Birth of a Nation or Jud Süß with our kids because nothing bad could possibly happen. [/sarcasm]
So you mean all fictions are propaganda?
No I am saying that you’re engaging in a logical fallacy and misreading my statements in the most extreme form to easily dismiss them.
All works of fiction express ideas. Some do it deliberately and openly, like propaganda, some do it subtly or even unconsciously. There is a lot of nuance to explore there, and academic fields like Literature Study which do so.
Humans can absorb ideas they encounter. There is a spectrum here in how conscious or subconscious this happens, a spectrum in just how big and complex and idea it is, from a nuanced exploration of the nature of power as teased out of Lord of the Rings, to just “The Spartan kicking the Persian in the well looks cool”, and of course a spectrum of how long these ideas stick and how much they influence human behaviour. There is also a lot of nuance to explore there, and academic fields that do so.
And lastly, society has always considered certain ideas and behaviours that follow from them (generally called “virtues”) to be worth spreading, and other ideas and behaviours (generally called “vices”) to be dangerous and thus worth stopping. Which ideas these are changes over time in many societal discussions and political processes.
There is a lot of attenuation between reading a book and then acting based on its ideas, and one can certainly have an argument just how strong this effect is.
But it’s insulting to claim there’s nothing to explore there, or that any attempt as a writer/creator to be conscious of this chain of (yes, very attenuated but still present) idea propagation is equivalent to crude propagandising and moralising.
@Bret,
I hope you enjoyed Western Michigan! I went to graduate school at MSU and did my fieldwork over in western Michigan, so I got to know the Kalamazoo area very well (and still make it up there on occasion).
Hope you have a good time, Bret.
Part of the issue with verisimilitude and authenticity is that people will say that people will take a view of history from a movie, no matter how explicitly silly that is. A good example would be Monty Python and the Holy Grail, or Blazing Saddles, given both films are not just silly but break the 4th wall in the finale to the point that they are explicitly, in the actual context of the films, not even set historically. But people will still try to say they create a misleading impression of the historical settings of modern England and Los Angeles, sounds a lot more silly when you spell it out.
At the end of the day, the point of a story is to be a story, same as the point of a documentary is to document things, even if this occasionally leads to stories that do not document things well, or documentaries that do not tell good or useful narratives. The fact that film and games, as mediums, often blur the lines between the two separate things by making them visually similar doesn’t mean there’s not a significant difference in function between, say Hansel and Grettle and a collection of tax records from 19th century germany. That isn’t to say there isn’t value to criticising innacuracies, but the critique is often valuable as a separate thing in and of itself, rather than simply a list of things the original author should have done differently (most obviously, this informative blog about history doesn’t stop being an informative blog about history the moment it mentions film or TV scenes – the series on Game of Throne’s inaccuracies was not less informative or valuable than the series on the life of peasant farmers, it was just framed with a more explicit reference point)
I am a historian who has been doing this almost thirteen years from the summer before my PhD to my COVID-era post-academic life (two websites, a mailing list, a Fediverse account, and many accounts on forums and mailing lists). However, I avoided corporate social media except for a limited Facebook account. In my view, the affordances and the political economy of smartphones and corporate social media are godsawful and these services will always end in tears. I often build on scholarship published in 1893 or 1786 which has barely been touched since, so the idea of letting fickle mods / a software update / a new owner delete or mangle or hide my work after a few hours or a few years never made sense to me. If I post simple HTML and CSS on a server I control, backed up on my own laptop, I trust it will be readable in 40 years.
The things I created to fill a gap where people want to know X but the answer is hidden in rare publications in multiple languages never got much visible attention. I have to pop up and point people to them more often than I find someone linking to them. However, when I talk to people with a common interest they usually know and respect something I have posted. And nothing that I have done has damaged my soul in the way that people who posted on pre-Musk twitter (let alone the new Nazi version) were damaged.
The issue with this criticism of movies is that, well, people want a movie. They want a work of fuction with a compelling story, not a documentary on the tactics and logistics of the Roman Empire. People who want extensive details on the tactics and logistics of the Roman Empire come *here*.
A related issue, somewhat reduced by CGI, is the logistics of filmmaking. If you wanted to show, say, Mongol cavalry having five times as many horses as people, you’d have to manage how to control that many horses at a gallop (not likely). Soldiers who would have worn helmets don’t in movies because having no idea who anyone is or wherethe main characters are is boring for the audience. In period romances, hostorical fashion fans may complain about costunesand dancing, but teaching actress from scratch to dance in early 1800s clothing and styles isn’t going to get you a facsimile of young women who wore those clothes daily and had “dancing masters” teaching them, and movies have limited time frames and resources, so some of those things are going to slide in davour of “are we telling a compelling story with good character interactions”.
Everyone is a nerd about something, and people who are nerds about a particular area of history, be it military tactics or fashion, are going to able to nitpick *every* period movie to death, because for the filmmakers those elements are just a few tiny aspects of the million things that go into making a movie.
Bret’s criticisms of Game of Thrones / ASOIAF resonate more with me because “this was invented based on shallow steretypes that make no sense” is a decision that is feels both more story-central and less necessary.