[Meta #2] Verisimilitude and Worldbuilding

[writerawakened]

AWW YEAH! Alright, boys and girls, hot on the heels of Meta #1 is Meta #2--and fashionably late to boot! By December I'll have it all done, BAM!

Today I was just musing on the idea of verisimilitude (or specifically, seeming authentic while not neccessarily being so) in writing--specifically in writing a medieval setting like FE, because that's what

Comments

[writerawakened]

Yeah, I do think something like a gas stove would be closer to passing as setting-appropriate. :P Cooking appliances seem to denote a common need as opposed to a computer's luxury (mostly), but when you get into the range (ha ha :P) of more contemporary things like, say, microwaves, it seems to suggest a level of convenience above that of pure necessity. Microwaves are a convenient way to cook stuff, but they're also ultimately unnecessary. On a similar note, going back to my example of arquebuses, I think a lot of readers would say that firearms tend to connote modernity, because "guns = modern warfare = pew pew!" So for those readers, it would jar them out of the story just by that denotation, which is what I like to avoid.

But I think it's the same principle in that the more advanced the technology, the more difficult in a linear fashion it becomes to suspend one's disbelief--or at least, for me that's how it works. Although it should be taken into account that different people have different limits to how much they'd accept something out of place (and obviously it's easier to suspend one's disbelief if the anachronistic tech is being used as a gag in a humorfic XD) I guess ultimately I just write only to my personal point of suspension because that's all I can go by. XD

(Aside: Cannons are pretty old as you probably know -- they hail from China circa 1250 if Wiki is to be believed, which makes them older than a great many things in FE.

Yep, that's true. But there isn't really a China-analogue in FE; so in this case, it would have to be an invention in a location that had the sulfur and saltpeter, and chemists knowledgeable enough to synthesize the gunpowder. Again, though, I'd be reluctant to introduce things like cannon so casually into one of my fics (despite them fitting the setting) because you don't actually see any used in-game--not the ones I've played, at any rate.

[amielleon]

I do think that ultimately how modern something is affects how out of place it seems in an FE fanfic. But I believe that the exceptions to that show us more about the exact truth behind the generalization.

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It would be era-appropriate -- cannons were around near the end of the middle ages, says wiki. I think the cannon is an example that argues against historical accuracy bettering suspension-of-disbelief: it's period-appropriate, yet seems out of place for FE!

[writerawakened]

I think the cannon is an example that argues against historical accuracy bettering suspension-of-disbelief: it's period-appropriate, yet seems out of place for FE!

Yeah, that's the point I was trying to make re: medieval firearms. In that case verisimilitude would contradict "accuracy." Maybe I should have clarified that in my post XD;;