You don't have to go looking for this stuff, it just traipses across your reading page, you guys
So, there are a zillion ways to write your historical fanfic.
One way is to do copious amounts of research and pull up documents from historical societies and basically do a tiny history disseration in fanfic form. And one hopes that, when one does a story like this, a story intended to accurately portray the past, that one manages both to accurately convey the prejudices of the time and to make it clear that the author of the story finds these attitudes wrong.
A different way to write historical fanfic is to write it up like a live action costuming event, where people wear the right clothes and stand in the right cities, and make some vague noises about being a lord or a slave or whatever, but speak in a turn of the millenium dialect and evince turn of the millenium attitudes, and are really completely inaccurate, except for historical allusions one uses to serve as window dressing or needs to drive the plot.
And the problem with writing such a story up the second way is that one's twenty first century attitudes gloss right over historical realities without necessarily examining the set up for internal consistency and plot-unrelated offensiveness.
Which is how I'm assuming you get a Regency Romance where same sex marriage is unremarkable, a mixed Jewish/Christian marriage in the nobility is unremarkable, a man of Indian descent is a British Lord, but also the protagonist is considering going to fight in India to make his living and the love interest is looking to escape the colonies.
Fighting who for what? Where? Under whose auspices? What colonies are we talking about exactly? And why, in this brave, new, totally racism free Regency England is anyone in a colony* to escape?
A few Wikipedia facts: First Asian in the House of Lords, as far as I have been able to determine, was seated in 1919. That's about 100 years after the story takes place. (First Asian MP was elected in 1892, also post-Regency.) During the Regency, the British East India Company controlled most of India through a series of complex agreements with local princes, and being Indian was not to be considered the equal of an Englishman, in law or custom.
So, sadly, the happy fun times gay Regency story has fucked up colonial issues. Which sucks donkeyballs, because what someone opening that story up wanted was 20k of the good slashcrack. But, weirdly enough, if you know a lot about the history of India and Britain and you read the story, the issues smack you in the face and throw you out of the whole thing and it's just sitting there being fucked up.
And there's no way to brace yourself for shit like that, you know? It's not like Avatar, where I saw the first trailer on FOX and I was like, "I don't need to watch a movie about What these people need is a honky." That's a movie that's deliberately engaging with Western colonialist history as a theme. It's doing it in the worst possible way, but no one can credibly tell me that historical racism never crossed James Cameron's mind while he put that story together.
A Matter of Inconvenience is not about race, thoughtlessly invokes colonial issues, and just doesn't put up any warning flags** for those who are about to read it.
Because, if I put on my mindreading hat, I'm going to assume that Astolat had two completely unconnected trains of thought.
Train of thought 1: How does a destitute nobleman in the Regency period keep eating? He signs up to fight in France or India.
Train of thought 2: Which season 8 American Idol is friendly with Kris and would tell him about the ridiculously rich guy he could marry to get out of his financial troubles? Kris and Anoop are totally buds!
And these two trains of thought, they never entered her brain station at the same time.
So, what's today's lesson? I don't have a lesson. To be perfectly honest, somebody else pointed out the problem with the story to me. (I have always had only the haziest ideas of when the Regency was or the historical timeline of British rule in India.) The person who pointed it out was bitching under lock because the blowback of pointing out the fuckedupedness was not worth it to them. I'm just saying, this is a thing Astolat fucked up. Everybody, please to endeavor not to fuck up like that with your next happy fun sexytimes historical.
*Yes, I realize that Adam specifically said he was escaping New York, and the United States were no longer British colonies by the Regency period. But a hell of a lot of other places still were British colonies, and those colonies also had rebellions and revolutions. (As a matter of fact, there still are British colonies; they call them British Overseas Territories now, and there have been both rebellions and disputes with other sovereign nations into the 1980's over some of those territories.)
**Well, except for the issues that the Regency always brings up, like the stuff: kohl, muslin, silks, ostrich feathers, precious stones, porcelain, etc. They're not coming from replicators, the Regency characters have access to those materials because of specific historical relationships and because they are members of a particular class.
Original post at Dreamwidth. Read (
) comments or reply there using Open ID.
One way is to do copious amounts of research and pull up documents from historical societies and basically do a tiny history disseration in fanfic form. And one hopes that, when one does a story like this, a story intended to accurately portray the past, that one manages both to accurately convey the prejudices of the time and to make it clear that the author of the story finds these attitudes wrong.
A different way to write historical fanfic is to write it up like a live action costuming event, where people wear the right clothes and stand in the right cities, and make some vague noises about being a lord or a slave or whatever, but speak in a turn of the millenium dialect and evince turn of the millenium attitudes, and are really completely inaccurate, except for historical allusions one uses to serve as window dressing or needs to drive the plot.
And the problem with writing such a story up the second way is that one's twenty first century attitudes gloss right over historical realities without necessarily examining the set up for internal consistency and plot-unrelated offensiveness.
Which is how I'm assuming you get a Regency Romance where same sex marriage is unremarkable, a mixed Jewish/Christian marriage in the nobility is unremarkable, a man of Indian descent is a British Lord, but also the protagonist is considering going to fight in India to make his living and the love interest is looking to escape the colonies.
Fighting who for what? Where? Under whose auspices? What colonies are we talking about exactly? And why, in this brave, new, totally racism free Regency England is anyone in a colony* to escape?
A few Wikipedia facts: First Asian in the House of Lords, as far as I have been able to determine, was seated in 1919. That's about 100 years after the story takes place. (First Asian MP was elected in 1892, also post-Regency.) During the Regency, the British East India Company controlled most of India through a series of complex agreements with local princes, and being Indian was not to be considered the equal of an Englishman, in law or custom.
So, sadly, the happy fun times gay Regency story has fucked up colonial issues. Which sucks donkeyballs, because what someone opening that story up wanted was 20k of the good slashcrack. But, weirdly enough, if you know a lot about the history of India and Britain and you read the story, the issues smack you in the face and throw you out of the whole thing and it's just sitting there being fucked up.
And there's no way to brace yourself for shit like that, you know? It's not like Avatar, where I saw the first trailer on FOX and I was like, "I don't need to watch a movie about What these people need is a honky." That's a movie that's deliberately engaging with Western colonialist history as a theme. It's doing it in the worst possible way, but no one can credibly tell me that historical racism never crossed James Cameron's mind while he put that story together.
A Matter of Inconvenience is not about race, thoughtlessly invokes colonial issues, and just doesn't put up any warning flags** for those who are about to read it.
Because, if I put on my mindreading hat, I'm going to assume that Astolat had two completely unconnected trains of thought.
Train of thought 1: How does a destitute nobleman in the Regency period keep eating? He signs up to fight in France or India.
Train of thought 2: Which season 8 American Idol is friendly with Kris and would tell him about the ridiculously rich guy he could marry to get out of his financial troubles? Kris and Anoop are totally buds!
And these two trains of thought, they never entered her brain station at the same time.
So, what's today's lesson? I don't have a lesson. To be perfectly honest, somebody else pointed out the problem with the story to me. (I have always had only the haziest ideas of when the Regency was or the historical timeline of British rule in India.) The person who pointed it out was bitching under lock because the blowback of pointing out the fuckedupedness was not worth it to them. I'm just saying, this is a thing Astolat fucked up. Everybody, please to endeavor not to fuck up like that with your next happy fun sexytimes historical.
*Yes, I realize that Adam specifically said he was escaping New York, and the United States were no longer British colonies by the Regency period. But a hell of a lot of other places still were British colonies, and those colonies also had rebellions and revolutions. (As a matter of fact, there still are British colonies; they call them British Overseas Territories now, and there have been both rebellions and disputes with other sovereign nations into the 1980's over some of those territories.)
**Well, except for the issues that the Regency always brings up, like the stuff: kohl, muslin, silks, ostrich feathers, precious stones, porcelain, etc. They're not coming from replicators, the Regency characters have access to those materials because of specific historical relationships and because they are members of a particular class.
Original post at Dreamwidth. Read (
) comments or reply there using Open ID.