the infamous "Okita wasn't gay, he murdered people!" debacle
Bwuh? What exactly does one half of that statement have to do with the other half?
Apparently a great deal, in the eyes of a certain Shinsengumi fanboy who for reasons of homophobia wanted to insist that a) despite the many texts and poems and so forth from the era which praise "manly love", samurai were actually almost never gay, and when they were they were duly socially censured as gays have ever been and ever must be for the sake of humanity's future... well you get it, and b) men who pursue Very Manly Occupations like killing other people for pay/idealism are for some reason immune from other Very Manly Occupations like gay sex. Something like that.
Historical fiction is a lot like fanfiction, in a way: you have a certain set of facts to work with (canon), a bunch of common assumptions and myths that haven't really been proven (fanon), and then you have your ship wars ("Jefferson slept with Sally Hemmings!" "OMG, no he didn't!" "Yes he did; we can prove it!").
It becomes even hairier when most people's only "historical" exposure to the character is in fact from fanfic! For example, I once met someone who insisted Richard III of England was a much better king (and Henry VII a correspondingly greater bastard) than is popular opinion... but most people haven't studied the era, they just take Will Shakespeare's word for it.
I once met someone who insisted Richard III of England was a much better king (and Henry VII a correspondingly greater bastard) than is popular opinion... but most people haven't studied the era, they just take Will Shakespeare's word for it. Except there's a fair amount of research that shows that Richard III was pretty much sandbagged historically by the following reign. I have not doubt he was both bad and good. History alone knows how he really was, we'll never really know. And Henry was a Bastard in a lot of ways. Dood killed several of his wives on rumour alone. And other reasons. But just as medieval and renaissance characters fall into the comfortable zone of 'okay to write cause they are so dead', Vietnam era characters are also okay to write because they are historical as well. Last week is historical. Two sentences ago is historical in the strictest sense. History is not a hard and fast objective genre. It's a manipulation of events through the eyes of the recorders of the history who are biased in their own ways, most of whom are the victors and have an agenda regarding the content of their stories for posterity. In a sense, a very real sense, historical writing is fanfiction. People writing it are fans of the event and write from that bias. The bible as well as many scriptoral writings also fall into this catagory. There are many actual canon pieces of information, I'll grant you that. Dates and times and sometimes even amounts of things, like deaths or monies or such. But the why's and wherefores are muddled by time and distance. Anyhow, this got a lot longer than I anticipated. I would add that even the telling of a story within a family has it's twists and turns. Ever play telephone as a child? That's how I view history. The idea of absolute truth is, in my mind, reserved for scientific facts and human nature. How we interpret them is what makes the fiction. I'll shut up now.
True enough. But saying someone just takes Shakespeare's word on it implies that affore mentioned writer didn't know what the fuck he was talking about. That he made everything up. But his stories were all rooted in the facts of the time and he was famous for putting his own cultural references in his writing.
...and if you read the passage of mine that you quoted, you'll notice I wasn't claiming that Shakespeare was talking out of his ass, just mentioning that I'd once met a person who made that claim.
It becomes even hairier when most people's only "historical" exposure to the character is in fact from fanfic! For example, I once met someone who insisted Richard III of England was a much better king (and Henry VII a correspondingly greater bastard) than is popular opinion... but most people haven't studied the era, they just take Will Shakespeare's word for it.
This is the quote you posted. You seem to be saying that this person got his impression from reading shakespeare, and that most people haven't study the era. I'm sorry, but to me it reads as if you're saying that Shakespeare isn't a credible source. That's how it reads to me.
I don't think she's claiming that Shakespeare isn't a credible source, just that his plays provide only one take on events (also, they punch it up a lot in order to make it play better on stage. I'm sure the real Macbeth didn't run around making deals with witches). If someone based their whole view of 15th century British politics on his work, it would be like making assumtions about the Napoleonic war based solely on Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe series.
As far as Richard III goes, the fact that Elizabeth I, the ruler of England when Shakespeare was writing Richard III, was descended from Henry Tudor, whose claim to the throne was shaky at best and who basically got to be king by having Richard III deposed, probably played a part in Shakespeare's decision to depict Richard III in a negative fashion. If you're writing a play about the guy the current bunch of rulers kicked off the throne, it probably pays to make him look like the bad guy, and show the people currently in power in the best possible light.
Yes, that's pretty much it. I have no doubt that Shakespeare had a good notion of period politics, but I also have no doubt that he had a sense of self-preservation, which would've governed how he dared portray or allude to those in power. Plus which, he - like everyone - is sure to have had his own bias.
In a sense, a very real sense, historical writing is fanfiction. People writing it are fans of the event and write from that bias.
Having done an undergraduate history thesis on the Civil War, I can get behind that idea. Every time I found a new primary or secondary source, I had to check when and where it was first published. Sometimes the battles had different names. Sometimes the ships had different names. Underwater mines were either a thing of genius, a bloody nuisance, or an abomination in violation of all laws of war, depending on whether the person writing about them was a Confederate naval officer, a blockade runner trying to sneak into Charleston harbor in the dark, or Union naval officers who were irritated that they hadn't thought of them first.
Even films about history have their own editorial slant: to stay with the Civil War genre, there's Birth of a Nation or Glory, Gone With the Wind, or Cold Mountain.
Exactly. That's the essense of historical story telling. At best we can nail down when things happened, mostly. At worst, we're left with patchy, biased accounts that need so much triangulation, they're nearly impossible to substantiate. Umberto Eco wrote wonderfully about this in Travels in Hypereality. The fractured interpretation of historical 'fact'. The idea that we can re-create anything historical or historically is fundamentally flawed. That was 'then'. There is no now that will ever be even remotely like then. For more reasons than can be counted. I spent a good chunk of my life studying medieval history. My experience is just as you say. I loved learning that Spain stopped drawing England on their maps for something like a hundred years after the sinking of the armada. Talk about revisionist history.
most people haven't studied the era, they just take Will Shakespeare's word for it.
Which would make them something like the fanfic writer who hasn't actually read Les Miserables, and decides to base her Valjean/Javert slash epic solely on the musical. The musical's a very good adaptation of the book, but think of all the details and subplots that get left out! Or like someone who's seen half an episode of SGA, and decided to write a Sheppard/McKay pwp based solely on having read Freedom.
Research is a lovely thing. Why, if I hadn't done some admittedly half-assed research for that Tombstone WIP, I'd never have known that Bat Masterson had a pimp stick, and my world would have been a sadder and far less amusing place.
Research is a lovely thing. Why, if I hadn't done some admittedly half-assed research for that Tombstone WIP, I'd never have known that Bat Masterson had a pimp stick, and my world would have been a sadder and far less amusing place.
See, this is why people who don't like doing research baffle me, cause it's half the fun. I mean really, how can people not enjoy finding out that Bat Masterson had a pimp pimp-stick. Or that Virgil used to call Wyatt the 'Earp-ape'. Or that Doc was born with a cleft-palate, and had to be fed out of a shot glass as a baby. Or, well, all of those fun facts that research can turn up, which are at least half the reason that I like writing historical fiction.
Amen! Though there are some things about research that make my teeth hurt. For example, just as Dumas preferred to ignore all the blood-and-gorey aspects of period warfare and focus on the gloriousness of it all! so do I prefer to ignore the fact that most probably, the real people behind the characters all had lice and bad teeth and smelled like week-dead goats. My Musketeers bathe, thank you very much!
Oh, very much agreed. But that's the nice thing about research- you don't have to use it, 'cause sometimes it's better to let historical fiction be, well, fictional. After all, sometimes, fleas and lice and rotten teeth just get in the way of the fun. And anyway, it;s not like Dumas spent much time on those details himself.
Dumas preferred to ignore all the blood-and-gorey aspects of period warfare and focus on the gloriousness of it all
Yes, he does that. I was seriously considering sticking blood poisoning in my pastiche fic, but I eventually decided not to drag it on that long (basically, I couldn't come up with a good reason to keep Porthos and Aramis wandering around in the woods for an extra day, or I'd have been there with the septicemia. Walking around with a musketball stuck in your shoulder is practically a recipe for it).
I'm sure Aramis at least bathes regularly. He's got a vested interest in keeping his hair/teeth/skin/etc. pretty. And Porthos cares deeply about appearances and the importance of nice clothing--not a man to go too long without donning a fresh shirt.
Bwuh? What exactly does one half of that statement have to do with the other half?
Apparently a great deal, in the eyes of a certain Shinsengumi fanboy who for reasons of homophobia wanted to insist that a) despite the many texts and poems and so forth from the era which praise "manly love", samurai were actually almost never gay, and when they were they were duly socially censured as gays have ever been and ever must be for the sake of humanity's future... well you get it, and b) men who pursue Very Manly Occupations like killing other people for pay/idealism are for some reason immune from other Very Manly Occupations like gay sex. Something like that.
Historical fiction is a lot like fanfiction, in a way: you have a certain set of facts to work with (canon), a bunch of common assumptions and myths that haven't really been proven (fanon), and then you have your ship wars ("Jefferson slept with Sally Hemmings!" "OMG, no he didn't!" "Yes he did; we can prove it!").
It becomes even hairier when most people's only "historical" exposure to the character is in fact from fanfic! For example, I once met someone who insisted Richard III of England was a much better king (and Henry VII a correspondingly greater bastard) than is popular opinion... but most people haven't studied the era, they just take Will Shakespeare's word for it.
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Except there's a fair amount of research that shows that Richard III was pretty much sandbagged historically by the following reign. I have not doubt he was both bad and good. History alone knows how he really was, we'll never really know. And Henry was a Bastard in a lot of ways. Dood killed several of his wives on rumour alone. And other reasons.
But just as medieval and renaissance characters fall into the comfortable zone of 'okay to write cause they are so dead', Vietnam era characters are also okay to write because they are historical as well. Last week is historical. Two sentences ago is historical in the strictest sense. History is not a hard and fast objective genre. It's a manipulation of events through the eyes of the recorders of the history who are biased in their own ways, most of whom are the victors and have an agenda regarding the content of their stories for posterity.
In a sense, a very real sense, historical writing is fanfiction. People writing it are fans of the event and write from that bias. The bible as well as many scriptoral writings also fall into this catagory.
There are many actual canon pieces of information, I'll grant you that. Dates and times and sometimes even amounts of things, like deaths or monies or such. But the why's and wherefores are muddled by time and distance.
Anyhow, this got a lot longer than I anticipated.
I would add that even the telling of a story within a family has it's twists and turns. Ever play telephone as a child? That's how I view history. The idea of absolute truth is, in my mind, reserved for scientific facts and human nature. How we interpret them is what makes the fiction.
I'll shut up now.
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This is the quote you posted. You seem to be saying that this person got his impression from reading shakespeare, and that most people haven't study the era. I'm sorry, but to me it reads as if you're saying that Shakespeare isn't a credible source. That's how it reads to me.
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As far as Richard III goes, the fact that Elizabeth I, the ruler of England when Shakespeare was writing Richard III, was descended from Henry Tudor, whose claim to the throne was shaky at best and who basically got to be king by having Richard III deposed, probably played a part in Shakespeare's decision to depict Richard III in a negative fashion. If you're writing a play about the guy the current bunch of rulers kicked off the throne, it probably pays to make him look like the bad guy, and show the people currently in power in the best possible light.
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Having done an undergraduate history thesis on the Civil War, I can get behind that idea. Every time I found a new primary or secondary source, I had to check when and where it was first published. Sometimes the battles had different names. Sometimes the ships had different names. Underwater mines were either a thing of genius, a bloody nuisance, or an abomination in violation of all laws of war, depending on whether the person writing about them was a Confederate naval officer, a blockade runner trying to sneak into Charleston harbor in the dark, or Union naval officers who were irritated that they hadn't thought of them first.
Even films about history have their own editorial slant: to stay with the Civil War genre, there's Birth of a Nation or Glory, Gone With the Wind, or Cold Mountain.
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I spent a good chunk of my life studying medieval history. My experience is just as you say. I loved learning that Spain stopped drawing England on their maps for something like a hundred years after the sinking of the armada. Talk about revisionist history.
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Which would make them something like the fanfic writer who hasn't actually read Les Miserables, and decides to base her Valjean/Javert slash epic solely on the musical. The musical's a very good adaptation of the book, but think of all the details and subplots that get left out! Or like someone who's seen half an episode of SGA, and decided to write a Sheppard/McKay pwp based solely on having read Freedom.
Research is a lovely thing. Why, if I hadn't done some admittedly half-assed research for that Tombstone WIP, I'd never have known that Bat Masterson had a pimp stick, and my world would have been a sadder and far less amusing place.
Reply
See, this is why people who don't like doing research baffle me, cause it's half the fun. I mean really, how can people not enjoy finding out that Bat Masterson had a pimp pimp-stick. Or that Virgil used to call Wyatt the 'Earp-ape'. Or that Doc was born with a cleft-palate, and had to be fed out of a shot glass as a baby. Or, well, all of those fun facts that research can turn up, which are at least half the reason that I like writing historical fiction.
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Yes, he does that. I was seriously considering sticking blood poisoning in my pastiche fic, but I eventually decided not to drag it on that long (basically, I couldn't come up with a good reason to keep Porthos and Aramis wandering around in the woods for an extra day, or I'd have been there with the septicemia. Walking around with a musketball stuck in your shoulder is practically a recipe for it).
I'm sure Aramis at least bathes regularly. He's got a vested interest in keeping his hair/teeth/skin/etc. pretty. And Porthos cares deeply about appearances and the importance of nice clothing--not a man to go too long without donning a fresh shirt.
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