484 – How Important Is Historical Accuracy?

The Mythcreant Podcast

The concept of historical accuracy can get really weird in speculative fiction. If you add magic, is it history anymore? What if you change everyone’s name slightly? Or maybe you just like to brag online about how much history you researched. At that point, how important is historical accuracy? Surprising no one, the answer is: it depends! And this week, we’re talking about all the ways in which it depends. Plus, desperately trying to remember the name for some fantasy creatures which may or may not be German.

Show Notes

• Taking Inspiration From History
• The Last Samurai
• The Dothraki Horde
• George RR Martin Explains Why There’s So Much Rape in Game of Thrones
• The War of the Roses
• History of Internment in the US
• The Calculating Stars
• Bridgerton Controversy
• Shogun
• William Adams
• Monique Poirier
• Jägermonster
• For All Mankind History
• The Mercury 13

Transcript

Generously transcribed by Arturo. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Intro:  You are listening to the Mythcreants Podcast with your hosts: Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.

[Music]

Bunny: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Bunny. And with me is:

Chris: Chris.

Bunny: And:

Oren: Oren.

Bunny: Long ago, in the Before Times, Oren did a post, a very famous post, a post that went down in history. And now, looking back as older and wiser podcast hosts upon this gentler time, we’re feeling inspired, but we can’t just copy the post, right? Or, like, maybe we can.

Oren: I’ll just read it; it’s fine. It’s from 2017. It’s not my best work.

Bunny: I mean, that’d be an easy answer. On the other hand, we can say we’re copying it and being entirely faithful, and then add a bunch of stuff about how Oren is good at fighting because he lives in the desert and only wears leather.

Oren: Perfect desert attire. Leather really breathes.

Bunny: Yeah, so today we’re going to be talking about taking inspiration from history, how to do it, how not to do it, and whether history nerds are going to come for our precious story babies. The answer to which is: Yes, probably.

Oren: Maybe? I’m trying to think of a big question about accuracy in historical fiction or fiction that is based on history, at which point the question of what accuracy even means starts to get weird. Like, pfft… different accuracy matters more to different people, I guess.

Bunny: If you want to get philosophical about it, even if you’re writing historical reports or whatever, you’re never going to get it 100%. It’s always going to be falsified to some extent.

Oren: I was hoping to find whether there were any studies on to what extent people’s views of actual history are influenced by either historical fiction or fiction that has a historical vibe to it, and I couldn’t find any. So I can only go by my anecdotes, which is that for a long time my friends group and I in high school believed that The Last Samurai was an accurate portrayal of Meiji Japan. And we just assumed that’s what Meiji Japan was like. And, I don’t know, that seems bad.

Chris: I do think it depends on what is the knowledge base society already has on this topic. But when people’s knowledge is low and they’re not passionate about something, I definitely think people assume what’s in a story is true, especially when it’s a trope that all the stories are using and then it just becomes like a default assumption without people really thinking about it real hard. Whereas if they have a history education, it’s not like it’s going to brainwash them into thinking that it must be true. But for a lot of people, they don’t think that hard about these things, and so it definitely will give them false ideas. I guess it’s hard to tell a story in history without taking some liberties. I think the question is: How big are we willing those liberties to be? And are there other ethical implications when we take certain kinds of liberties with history?

Bunny: I think, in terms of just broadly historical accuracy, a lot of it depends on what expectations you’re setting for your story. For example, something like Game of Thrones implies a much higher bar for realism because it’s trying to be all gritty. And Martin even likes to talk about all the history he took inspiration from, which makes it extra embarrassing that things like the Dothraki are pretty crap when it comes to being historically accurate to the groups that he claims they were inspired by, or literally taken from.

Oren: I mean, the Dothraki don’t make any sense with their own context, let alone, I don’t know what part of them he thinks is inspired by the Plains Indians tribes. But the more obvious inspiration is the Mongol Empire. And they don’t make any sense in that context or in their own context. They’re just a bunch of very violent boys, and their economy is violence, and their relationships are violence, and their entertainment is violence.

Chris: Yeah, I would say that for Game of Thrones, this is not a historical setting. I do think that in many cases the claim that something is historical in some way is used to try to make it look like the storyteller isn’t making biased choices, which is absolutely not true. And when we’re looking at Game of Thrones, the realism in Game of Thrones is not about historical accuracy; it’s about atmosphere, and I think that’s really important when it comes to… Martin said that’s why he put rape in his story, and so it’s very different if you’re like, “Oh, well, this needs to be historically accurate, so I included rape,” or “I was building atmosphere, so I included rape.” One of those things looks more justified than the other, and if it’s a fictional setting, I don’t think that you have an obligation to be historically accurate. And other ethical concerns, like: “Are you representing a group respectfully?” “Are you being respectful to survivors of sexual assault?” become much more important than the idea that you’re trying to be historically accurate when it is literally not history. Not that historical accuracy couldn’t enhance Game of Thrones in some ways, but I feel like at that point, it’s a tool for creating a setting that feels real in building that atmosphere that he wants.

Bunny: And he’s been explicit about wanting to be drawing from history here as well, and he’s definitely saying that to make the setting sound like it is, anyway,

Oren: I think that’s just a clout thing, to be perfectly honest. It’s like if I went around bragging about how my book is based on the Byzantine Empire, it was like a “kinda” in that I had a big fandom of the Byzantine Empire at the time I was writing it, I incorporated some aspects in a completely different context, but that’s what it sounds like to me whenever I hear anyone talk about how “historical” Game of Thrones is. I think that’s just a flex. I don’t think that has anything to really do with how the story was written, especially considering how, if you have even like a passing knowledge of the War of the Roses, you can tell all the stuff that is not in there that would’ve been if this was actually War of the Roses-inspired fiction.

Chris: Can you give us some examples?

Oren: I mean, look at what people in War of the Roses wore. It’s real goofy. Their fashion looks ridiculous. It would be impossible to take that seriously.

Bunny: Oh, look at that hat!

Oren: Yeah, it’s bad.

Bunny: They should be wearing hats like that.

Oren: Also, guns. War of the Roses is a gunpowder war. Not like the Revolution or the Civil War, but firearms existed, and the fact that in the actual War of the Roses, the various leaders tried not to pillage and to spoil the country they were fighting over, because they still wanted it to be intact when they won, and I’m not saying Medieval warfare was nice or gentle; there are many, many, many examples where it was absolutely horrible and brutal, but in that particular instance, they often tried to avoid that, because this was their kingdom they were fighting for. So there are so many parts of the War of the Roses that don’t match up with Westeros at all. So this whole, like, “It’s drawn from history”? No. That’s just a flex. That’s just ’cause it sounds good on social media.

Bunny: Also, if you want a more nuanced breakdown of why the Dothraki are not accurate at all to the steppe people and the Plains Indians, go check out the blog A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry by Brett Devereaux. I hope I’m pronouncing that right. Because, wow, does Martin’s claim that he only put a dash of fantasy in there really not hold up.

Oren: I mean, in general, if anyone ever tells you that a society is 90% warriors, no, no, it’s not. It’s 90% food producers 100% of the time.

Bunny: A lot of the criticism boils down to: Where are the sheep? But I think, if you’re using another setting, like an alternate history setting, or one that seems largely like Medieval-inspired or whatever, if you’re writing a comedy that’s already much lower in realism, people aren’t going to ding you about not being faithful to the fancy hats in the War of the Roses.

Oren: Yeah. To be clear, I’m not suggesting he should have put in the hats.

Bunny: I’m suggesting that.

Oren: I am very well aware of the fact that history does not conform to best narrative practices. So, if you are writing fantasy and you’re inspired by history, I don’t think that means you have to be historically accurate. I think that’s A) impossible, and B) would make stories worse. And yeah, it still annoys me a bit that some people think that Lord of the Rings is an accurate reflection of Medieval life, but I don’t think that can be Tolkien’s fault. I think at some point the responsibility has to be shifted elsewhere.

Bunny: Right, and the exception, I suppose, is that, if you’re setting your story during an actual historical event, and this is like historical fiction or alternate timeline fiction, even then you have to have the bones of the scenario pretty accurate, right?

Chris: Yeah. I definitely think it matters what you are depicting. And again, a lot of times there are just other ethical considerations when it comes to representing something well, besides just, “Is this factually correct or not?” Especially when there’s people involved who got hurt. So, if you’re depicting a specific event in history, I do think you have to worry more about erasing bad stuff that happened. I think Game of Thrones, which is a fantasy version that only uses history as a tool, it’s definitely not supposed to be historical, doesn’t really have any excuse for having atrocities in there, because that’s not real. It’s not erasing them, because it’s a fantasy world. Whereas if you have a real war like World War II, and for instance, in the US the Japanese are put in internment camps, you don’t necessarily want to exploit the pain of Japanese Americans by showing that in any excruciating detail. But at the same time, you also have some obligation to not pretend that the US did not do bad things. And to not make that look like that didn’t happen.

Oren: That can get real gray real quickly, like pretending that internment didn’t happen. Obviously bad. Having a Jewish character in the ‘50s who maybe encounters less antisemitism than would be statistically average? Uh, I’m less upset about that. That was a critique I saw of The Calculating Stars, was a claim that antisemitism was a lot more prevalent in the immediate post-World War II years than that book suggests. From my research, that is probably correct, but it’s not like it is impossible that this Jewish character could have the events happen as they do in the book. It just means that she would’ve been running into more forward-thinking people than were 100% common. And, I don’t know, to me that’s OK, but also, I’m Jewish; I have a reason to speak about this. There are much more complicated arguments that I have no stake in.

Chris: Again, there’s a lot of this balancing factor between how do you make sure that marginalized people that existed in history are not erased, but if they’re marginalized and you’ve got, for instance, grand politics, sometimes those people aren’t well positioned to influence story outcomes, and so then it becomes tricky to figure out how you make it not erase them and still represent them. I know Bridgerton had a lot of controversy around the way that it decided to just reimagine history.

Oren: Yeah, I do not have an answer to that one.

Chris: That’s hard, I know. I don’t feel qualified to talk about that one, but what I want to say is those ethical considerations about things that are particularly sensitive are just more important than, “Okay, we took a random event. Now, did this part of the event actually happen or not?” It can be sometimes more of a matter of fact than it is of it’s sensitive or there’s ethical ramifications about those things in particular.

Oren: Yeah, but I want to complain about how Shogun is not an accurate portrayal of Tokugawa Ieyasu. That’s not accurate! He’s not like that!

Chris: Do you need to complain about Shogun? Do you want to tell us where Shogun hurt you?

Bunny: What is a podcast for, if not complaining, Oren?

Oren: I mean, perhaps in an attempt to be somewhat constructive, Shogun is an interesting example. This new TV show, which is actually the second time this book has been made into a show, and it is an interesting example of accuracy in historical fiction because, first of all, it’s alternate history in that all the names are changed, but you still know who everyone is very easily. It’s not hard to figure them out. Like, Toranaga is obviously Tokugawa. The dead Taiko is clearly Toyotomi Hideyoshi. But there’s a lot of stuff like that, and obviously Blackthorn is William Adams. It was a real person, real English guy who came to Japan. So that’s all there. Then you get into the question of how much does it matter that in this version, Toranaga is this really upstart, ethical, almost Ned Stark-like character who doesn’t want power and is super loyal to the heir of the previous ruler and he only goes after power ’cause he has no choice, as opposed to the real Tokugawa, who really wanted power and forced the heir of the previous ruler to commit suicide. Does it matter? Is that a big deal? I don’t know. It bothers me a little bit, but I’m not sure it’s a huge issue. I don’t think there are a lot of Tokugawa apologists out there. Maybe there are in Japan, I don’t know. Not Japanese, but certainly in the United States, there aren’t a lot of people being like, “Tokugawa did nothing wrong.”

Bunny: I think it’s a salient observation that the real-world implications of the things that you’re changing, if it’s just some guy in history who played a small role and nobody gives a crap about, you’re probably not doing any damage by messing around with that story a bit. Whereas if you’re claiming there weren’t concentration camps, now that is a different matter, my friend.

Oren: Especially ’cause there are real people who claim that, and who think that’s a thing, and those people can die mad about it.

Chris: Or just all the people who assume that any period of history in Europe doesn’t have anybody except for white people, where it’s like, look, a lot of things happened in Europe and it’s a big enough place. People came and went. So it’s not necessarily as white as people think it was. And so, again, looking at a period of Europe and not looking for where there was diversity can play into narratives that then are used by people to complain about any story that has, like, a Black person in it, for instance.

Oren: Right. Although Shogun is also interesting from another angle. Shogun the book uses Blackthorn as its main character, Blackthorn being the fictional equivalent of William Adams. Now the show can’t deviate from that too much. Like, they make some changes, but they can’t not have Blackthorn as the main character. The problem is that the real William Adams didn’t have anything to do with Tokugawa’s rise to power. He was there, but he was important afterwards. He was important for helping Tokugawa break the Portuguese shipping monopoly, and for Tokugawa’s… ultimately didn’t go anywhere, but at the time, important attempts to build a European-style navy for Japan. So he was an important person, but not for the specific period of time that the story covers. And so the show is a little unclear what to do with him. In the book, the author just goes with the idea that none of these Japanese people know what a gun is, and he teaches them how to use guns.

Chris: Hmm.

Oren: The show was not willing to be that inaccurate, probably ’cause it’s insulting. So instead they went with the idea that he has better canons than they had, which is maybe possible. But then they very quickly learned how to use the canons, so we’re back at square one of why is Blackthorn here. The answer right now is that he has witty things to say. He’s a very witty guy.

Chris: Oren, do you know why the original guy was kept in Japan?

Oren: Because he was very useful to Tokugawa, because Tokugawa did not like the Portuguese. He really didn’t like Christianity.

Chris: But what about him was useful?

Oren: Because otherwise Tokugawa had no one to tell him about the Portuguese except the Portuguese.

Chris: Okay.

Oren: There were so few Europeans who had made it to Japan at that point that he just needed someone who understood European politics and knew what was going on, and Adams fit that bill.

Chris: Okay.

Bunny: See, when I say that history nerds will come for your precious story babies, I am talking about Oren.

Chris: And also me, because then Oren tells me. I wouldn’t know that all of this was wrong, but then he tells me, so then I do know, and then I’m grumpy.

Oren: Yeah, now Chris is going to make it all your problem.

Chris: And then I, on the podcast, tell Oren to complain about the show. So people besides me have to suffer in knowing that Shogun isn’t accurate.

Bunny: And so it spreads and spreads.

Oren: I don’t dislike Shogun. I’m enjoying it just fine, but I do feel like Blackthorn is a bit ancillary to the actual story they want to tell.

Bunny: Yeah. And to go back to the point about who are you representing in this historical or historical-inspired setting, one community and genre that has had this conversation quite a bit, in which there’s not really a consensus, is steampunk. Steampunk is interesting in that it is both a genre and a community disconnected from media in the genre. It is also just an aesthetic that people like to dress up for, without being connected to a particular book, which makes it especially interesting. And so there’s been a lot of conversation about whether taking this Victorian aesthetic and sensibility, whether that is a kind of Victorian nostalgia. The Victorian period was not like a super great time, guys. This was a very colonialist time then.

Chris: Yeah, I think you could really make the argument for just about a lot of fantasy genres, and I can understand the fear of glorifying, like we’ve talked before about glorifying monarchy, for instance, and that’s maybe not great, and that there are still some places where monarchy could be a real threat. I personally would, again, not go so far to say that this aesthetic is automatically bad because we are validating periods of history.

Bunny: No, and I’m not saying that either, to be clear. I think that steampunk is quite fun, and the aesthetic is fun, and I like to put gears on things as well, but it does leave non-white fans in an interesting scenario. So there’s a cosplayer named Monique Poirier (Poirier? I write these things down, and then I say them, and immediately second-guess myself because I forget that this is an audio medium) who is Native American. And so she’s written about how to incorporate her cultural identity into something that’s very Eurocentric. And then, when she tries to do it, she goes to conventions and then people ask her where are all her feathers, if she’s inspired by Native Americans.

Chris: Augh!

Oren: Yeah…

Bunny: That’s painful.

Oren: I mean, that’s weirdly gross, I guess short of saying, don’t do that!

Chris: Don’t stereotype people, please.

Bunny: Don’t stereotype people. That’s good advice. Hot takes for Mythcreants.

Oren: Let me put it this way: I think that the most viable path forward is for us to work on creating spaces where people don’t do that, and then having us folks be like, “Yeah, we’re going to do the English-inspired steampunk, ’cause I’m not going to do Native American-inspired steampunk. I’m not Native American.” And then we can just try to be better people, I guess is the way I would solve that problem.

Chris: Yeah. I would also say that steampunk is already diverged from history quite a bit, and yes, a lot of its aesthetic is inspired by Victorian England, but I don’t necessarily think that it can’t branch out more, because it still has a lot of aesthetic components, like the clockwork, that could be combined with other things. And I feel like it’s so loosely based on history already that I would rather move towards just detaching it altogether. In this case, I would almost say that steampunk is better if you don’t pretend it’s real world. Put it in a second world, do what you want with it.

Bunny: The problem with steampunk, too, is that, at least when most people think about it, they do tie this so much to alternate history. I’ve been doing research on this as part of my senior project, and it’s very difficult to find a definition that’s not related to a diverging timeline in actual history or something, which sucks for me, because I’m writing a second world steampunk-type thing, and so I’m like, “This doesn’t help.” But it is closely tied to that, and I don’t know if it will ever be completely divorced from that, especially since some of the founding works in the genre were alternate histories, like The Difference Engine, for example. But Monique Poirier (Poirier? I’m so sorry. Monique) has, as a cosplayer… a lot of steampunk cosplayers come up with histories for their characters and stuff. So she sort of asked how could native technologies be translated into a sort of steampunk setting or aesthetic? And she went with that. And so she came up with this whole alternate North America where the tribes are in a confederacy that includes the Kingdom of Hawaii and stuff like that, which I thought was an interesting and new way to go about it, rather than just remixing England again.

Chris: It also sounds like a great way to freshen up steampunk, too.

Oren: That sounds really cool. I’m glad that she is writing that. I’m not going to.

Chris: Well, yeah.

Oren: But for me it’s going to be, if I want to make steampunk cool and interesting, I’m going to set it in a world where there’s no ground and there’s just floating islands of stone that you have to take airships between. That’s how I’m going to freshen up steampunk.

Bunny: And then you fight over hammers, It’s clearly not Earth, and so you don’t have to worry about the fact that you’re in a colonial setting at a specific time on Earth anymore. You can make it go on its own way.

Chris: Yeah, I’d love to see more second-world steampunk.

Bunny: Let us free ourselves from England and create wonderful gear-powered contraptions.

Oren: Isn’t Girl Genius second world?

Chris: Yes, I believe so. Or if it is Earth, it’s only very loosely.

Bunny: Well, there are, like, German…

Chris: Yeah, it’s true. They do have clearly a family that comes from Germany.

Oren: Are they German or are they like Eisenfaust?

Chris: I feel like it’s probably the latter one.

Oren: Are they French or are they Montague?

Chris: Yes, I suspect it’s the latter one, where it’s clearly Earth-inspired, but not actually. It’s been a while since I’ve read that one.

Bunny: Yeah, it’s been a while for me too. But I do remember that they have those goblin guys, I… I don’t remember what they’re called, but they all have really thick German accents.

Oren: Hmm. I would probably not make that choice, but sure.

Chris: Yeah, I don’t… I don’t recommend…

Bunny: But they’re not goblins. What are they called?

Chris: Okay, but they’re not humans. Just don’t recommend taking a non-human species/race or whatever and applying a real-world ethnicity of any kind. I don’t know. I wouldn’t complain if it was the English.

Oren: Certainly not in a way where it’s really obvious where you’re like, “Oh, those guys are Germans.” Germany’s not really in danger from this. I’m not worried about people mistreating Germans ’cause of it. It just doesn’t feel good.

Bunny: Okay. So I’m trying to look this up. First of all, I looked up “girl genius species” and it’s correcting it to “girl genus species.”

Oren: Well, that’s not helpful.

Bunny: To which Wikipedia says, “female.” So thank you. So I can’t find this right now, but it’s true that a lot of the characters have distinct German names, but I think you’re right, Chris. And not just German-accent alternate-species guys, but I think you’re right that there’s not actual Germany there.

Chris: As far as what makes sense in the real world, I think For All Mankind is a good example of alternate history that is molded in such a way that we include more marginalized characters, and it feels based in history, and is rigorous enough that it feels justified that it takes place on Earth. Because the premise of For All Mankind is that Russia or the USSR got to the moon first, and that extended the space race, which pushed both the USSR and the United States to invest more in their space programs, so we had more cool space things than before.

Bunny: Jägermonsters!

Chris: There we go.

Bunny: Oh yeah, yeah. I remembered them. Continue.

Chris: Those are not in For All Mankind; those are in Girl Genius, by the way.

Bunny: Crossover? Crossover?

Chris: Yeah. But in For All Mankind, as an example, the USSR shows off by getting a woman to the moon first. And at that time there are no female astronauts in the United States, and so then they’re like, “Oh, drat, well, we need to match them.” And so then they restart, find the old… The astronauts were real; the US really did train some women to be astronauts only to cut the program. So in this alternate history version, they go and bring some of them back and get that started. And so the various levers like that are pulled so that we can have faster social progress during the course of the show. But it’s very much somebody’s looking at: “Here’s the specific events that happened in history, and here’s how they would go differently, and then here’s the effects that would have,” and it has rigorousness that a lot of people like from historical settings. Whereas when you have something like steampunk, where being accurate to history was never the point in the first place, it feels like maybe you should just give it its own world and break free of that.

Oren: That’s certainly my plan. Although, before we leave, I do have to complain a little bit about For All Mankind, because it does show an interesting problem that when you create a point of divergence, you change more and more. It becomes increasingly difficult to include references that the audience will recognize and still be believable. Some of them are small, like there’s a lot of pop culture stuff that, if you really think about it, probably wouldn’t have happened in this new timeline. But the one that just really gets me is that Al Gore is elected president in 2000, even though in this timeline Clinton was never president, so Al Gore was never vicepresident. Why was he even running?

Chris: He gets speech coaching much earlier.

Bunny: He’s a cool dude!

Oren: Who do these people think Al Gore was before he was vice president? I don’t think Al Gore was popular enough on his own to be a presidential ticket without Clinton. It seems unlikely to me.

Chris: And when he was running for president, the big complaint was that he just had no stage presence. That he was like a boring nerd that would just talk at you in a boring way.

Bunny: Hey, as a boring nerd who just talks at you in a boring way, I take offense to that.

Chris: But then I remember when the documentary An Inconvenient Truth came out, and he was actually a good speaker in that documentary, everybody’s like, “What the hell, Gore? Why couldn’t you do this earlier?” So I’ll just imagine this is an alternate timeline where he got speech coaching because he didn’t get the VP pick.

Oren: All right. With that very important historical critique done, I think we are going to have to call this episode to a close.

Chris: If this episode inspired you to write about history, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Aman Jabber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.

[Music]

Outro: This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Colton.