The True Tale of Bison William
I’ve just finished reading The Life of Hon. William F. Cody / Known As / Buffalo Bill / The Famous Hunter, Scout and Guide / An Autobiography, and very enjoyable it was too.
I’m not a great fan of the Western, and nearly didn’t pick this up off the second-hand bookstall, but second thoughts as to its suitability as source material made me have ( Read more... )
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It’s odd to think though, that the sort of behaviour that would prompt a bit of head-shaking and teeth-sucking in a game, and possible longer term consequences, depending on the GM, is not apparently considered very reprehensible or shameful in real life less than 150 years ago.
Yes: this is very much the sort of issue that comes up when looking at historical fiction and film. (This article is a favourite of mine.) I do think it is a problem when writers (or indeed, gamers) cannot put their contemporary selves and mind-sets aside and look at the past on its own terms. Some 18C people of whom I am very fond had a West Indian estate, which means they had slaves. It was not considered unusual or aberrant at the time. When I write about them, I note it as a fact, but I'm not going to get on my Abolitionist high-horse about it, because that did not become a major cause until a few decades later. Similarly, with mediæval people, I know they would have held views on a range of ( ... )
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I don't mind a bit of "historical escapism" with 21st-Century-style characters dropped into a setting they're unlikely to have developed in, but I certainly share your view that its prevalence is worrying. A bit more balance and historically considerate fiction would be welcome.
Anne Scott McLeod's point that Strength ... has more than one face is the key; but sadly this is seldom recognised within modern settings with contemporary characters, never mind requiring authors to put themselves in the place of characters we have no directly observable prototypes for. I don't excuse it, it just seems to be the way it is.
I don't think it's just down to fiction writers; I don't think much of the reductive reporting in our media, especially the papers, which attempts to paint everything in black and white from a particular viewpoint. Naturally the red-tops are worst, but it's everywhere.
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It goes back to Walter Scott and the birth of the modern historical novel. The problem is that for a lot of readers, too much of this kind of thing skews their mind-set: the expect people in the past to be 'just like us but in fancy dress', and give howls of outrage when they discover otherwise. They don't seem to realise that history is as much a branch of anthropology as anything else: but the strange and curious peoples one studies are exotic and distant in time, not necessarily geography, and are often one's own ancestors.
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