Fun with history
So there's this book series that's aimed so squarely at my id that even the stuff that really I should be critical of (info dumps and all) just slide right on past me. But I read a review of the series recently that complained about the fact that this urban fantasy series went way overboard with the historical characters. They thought it killed the suspension of disbelief to have so many vampires etc turn out to be famous people.
And you know, that never even occurred to me, although it has in other series. And as a criticism, it felt fundamentally misguided in some way. And then it hit me. You know those crossover fics you write that are basically all your favorite characters shoved in a room? You don't really care about the plot, it's pretty much just (as I think bellatemple described it) "Look, I Can Do The Voices"? That what these books are. (And no wonder, the author is a history PhD. Like me. Also probably explains why they hit me right in the id). The whole point of having time travel and vampires is, for these books, to be able to steal interesting people from history and stick them in a room without having to come up with plausible reasons or being limited to people who were actually alive at the same time.
The other sign of it is how often she sticks historical figures in the margins. Not part of the story, not even explicitly stated, but there are a lot of subtle references to characters who in a movie would be extras that imply that they're also historical figures.
And you know, that never even occurred to me, although it has in other series. And as a criticism, it felt fundamentally misguided in some way. And then it hit me. You know those crossover fics you write that are basically all your favorite characters shoved in a room? You don't really care about the plot, it's pretty much just (as I think bellatemple described it) "Look, I Can Do The Voices"? That what these books are. (And no wonder, the author is a history PhD. Like me. Also probably explains why they hit me right in the id). The whole point of having time travel and vampires is, for these books, to be able to steal interesting people from history and stick them in a room without having to come up with plausible reasons or being limited to people who were actually alive at the same time.
The other sign of it is how often she sticks historical figures in the margins. Not part of the story, not even explicitly stated, but there are a lot of subtle references to characters who in a movie would be extras that imply that they're also historical figures.