Things I Am Crotchety About, Rant #2

[cesperanza]

So my last mega-fandom was SGA, and the thing is, I could pretty much go anywhere with SGA, because in a way, the characters were paper thin: you tell me John Sheppard is a robot, I say sure! A dogwalker? Fine! A barista--with that hair, absolutely! He wears lingerie under his uniform: makes perfect sense. And Rodney--you could do anything with

Comments

[catalenamara]

I'll settle for just a little minor research on the part of some authors. Such as the one who had Steve saying something along the lines of "back in my day we only had 10 channels on TV."

But yeah. Pasting modern attitudes on historical characters has been a pet peeve of mine for decades.

[china_shop]

Such as the one who had Steve saying something along the lines of "back in my day we only had 10 channels on TV."

LOL!

[cesperanza]

Ahahaha. Oh my god, okay, I never even got within a MILE of a story that bad! I'm talking about characters having, IDK, anti-authoritarian attitudes, or slackerish vibes, or anachronistic vocabulary, or dealing much better with rock and roll music than they ought to. I can't even deal with the 10 channels on TV thing. *falls over laughing*

[catalenamara]

Anachronistic attitudes - of any kind - are a huge speed bump in stories for me. I feel the same way, in SF stories, about people who assume that because "it's done this way right now" it'll be be done exactly the same way.

Example: Did you ever see Blake's 7? A future dystopia where the government keeps the citizens drugged into complacence. One of the characters, Vila, was always drinking. I'll always remember the LOC someone sent to a letterzine proposing, seriously, that Vila join an AA program.

Or Star Trek TOS. I remember someone wrote a letter to a letterzine back in the late 70s taking issue with something some author had done because "the military just doesn't work that way". It had to do with certain procedures for treating soldiers who had PTSD (IIRC, that term was just coming into use then; I remember my father referring to it as "shell shock".) And of course now the military works the way that letter writer was certain would *never* happen.

[cesperanza]

I feel that way every time pre-war Steve uses a condom (even funnier: a rubber condom.)

[catalenamara]

LOL! Now I'm thinking about a story in another fandom I read AGES ago where they had sophisticated fingerprinting technology - in the 1890s.