I disagree tbh. If your setting is a complete fantasy without any say, Roman Empires or Christianities, the calendar will be a glaring incongruene if it’s not changed. Nothing like an elf coming out and talking about “August” like that’s a culturally relevant thing.
(Assuming a Gregorian analogue is used though, there should be an explanation of what equals what easily accesible)
I mean, if there’s a Roman analogue you could just have a Julius and Augustus.
It does also depend on what mythology exists here though. If this fantasy is like D&D where the various Pagan gods are present, that’s one thing but English day names are gonna be a bit odd if Roman and Norse mythology doesn’t exist.
Admittedly, it’s a fool’s errand to try and exclude every word that’s a reference to something that doesn’t exist in fantasy land. You really just need to stick to stuff you can manage that non-pedants would actually notice. That list seems to expand a lot as time goes on but it’s a lot easier to get away with say, having gauze be called gauze than having someone use Jesus’s name as a curse.
One meta example is that sometimes a creator will get an absurd amount of hate and harassment from awful fans over a bad creative decision and you need to condemn that obviously, nothing warrants that. But it just so happens that it WAS a legitimately bad creative decision, extremely bad in fact, sometimes bad in a way that couldn’t NOT have made people angry even if the response is horrible.
Then the whole issue becomes radio-active. Like, what do you even say about it? Doesn’t feel right to criticize the decision when people responded like this. But like, it doesn’t make it any easier to enjoy the story after it. Everyone’s talking about something that really bothers them and you feel the same way but other people say that it’s bad to criticize it because the criticism is tainted with this. And then some people who DID enjoy it (fine on its own) deflect even good faith criticism as fan entitlement. Like so much as implying the writer made a bad call is entitled now. I can’t say I don’t get where they’re coming from but it’s still scummy and disingenuous. You can condemn terrible behavior without acting like there’s no objection to be had.
Saw it happen with Sasha’s death in AOT. Anyone who harassed the author or the killer’s VA over that is a worthless scumbag but that doesn’t mean I endorse that creative decision. I couldn’t think of a defense for that decision from an artistic standpoint if you held a gun to my head.
I have seen this happen with quite a few things and my thought on those situations are the same.
Condemn the bad actors (the people harassing I mean) but that should not mean complete shutdown of actual criticism. If it was just one or the other then nothing would be able to be criticized as sadly, death threats and terrible harassment is sent to almost everyone even if it’s not like a decision a creator made. Heck, it can even be a thing that one person just didn’t like and they will send threats or harassment which is the sad reality.
Sorry for rambling, but it’s a thing I notice that happens a lot unfortunately and it really is just a messed up situation.
In my work, Falrika the Alchemist, I basically renamed the names of the months and days based on their old Japanese names.
For example, January is called mutsuki (睦月), which means “month of harmony (among family and relatives)”, and thus I renamed it “Affectionmonth”. Tuesday is renamed “Fireday” (火曜日, kayoubi).
This is heavily justified, as my IF borrows heavily from anime, visual novels, and overall Japanese culture.
This is an example of it adding something to the setting, and not just being a distraction like morndas instead of monday. When they’re that close to the real word, imo it also pulls too much attention to the fact that the characters shouldn’t be speaking English lol.
From my point of view, both are equally terrible if I need to actually be able to keep track of time with them. (Also I don’t think “morndas” resembling the actual word is that bad, plenty of real worlds in different languages resemble each other.)
True, it’s not like I like it when they’re renamed, even when it adds something to the setting. It’s just more bookkeeping on my end, especially if there’s some kind of calendar puzzle in the game. 
Eh. Not quite. At least to me where I often have to deal with two different calenders. The gregorian calender is used normally because its most convenient and most well known. The issue is not inherently the idea of making a new calender to maintain immersion. But that being less clear and more confusing for no good reason besides it being a fantasy world. I.E the amount of days in the month or the amount of months is not relevant to the plot. It just detracts from the experience completely for me since I end up having to guess what that month is supposed to be and I have to remember what the season would look like so im not imagining winter as summer and end up seeing plot holes that dont exist.
I can always more easily suspend my disbelief and assume that like the fact they are speaking english. The translation of the months in lore is also translated to the month we know. Yknow?
Some lore page illustration of an “untranslated” calendar using the names they actually use would be cool though!
(And now I’m having an urge to make a calendar using names directly translated from Finnish. Hmm.)
I’d like to think the author can be as complex as they want with their world, even if they wanted to change the unit of time. But to that extent you have to remember if you are writing this world for others to understand or to interpret. Its the difference between Kingdom Hearts ! story line and anything out of a Soulsborne game.
There is a ton of world to explore but does your audience want to do that? Or is this project for you and they can interpret the story however they please once you’ve completed it?
If you want a calendar make one, but know the audience of calendar enthusiasts is a short list. It might be one of those things you do for you the authors sake to feel awesome because… calendars are hard ask the Gregorian monks.
I think that’s a bit of a false dichotomy 
Who knows if the audience wants to explore it or not? Not me. But Soulsborne games have milions of players who explore them (and hours of youtube lore videos with thousands of views).
I think the trick is to make the game fun enough for the person who has no desire to explore the setting further to still enjoy themselves.
Complaining about calendars in fantasy - what fantasy book or game annoyed you guys so much that you even notice the calendar? Because I’ve never seen anyone have issues with adjusting to it in the Elder Scrolls.
I meant that its good but not likely to be noticed, unless you’re looking for it.
I’ve never noticed Elder Scrolls even has calendar, so I have no idea what’s there to adjust to.
It has its own astrology too!
Exactly my point. People can seamlessly accept new calendar names if it’s in the background somewhere, just adding to the flavour of the setting.
I mean sure the world does, but does that calendar actually ever appear in-game?
Ah, right. Now I remember. I went from “WTF does that even mean” to “whatever, I’ll just ignore it”, because it didn’t actually tell me anything (apart from what time it is).
I thought it was location, at first.
Well, at least it tells you it’s the first day of the week, and not a werewolf festival for a full moon! (Not that “Moonday” isn’t literally the name of Monday.)
flashbacks to that one quest in Kingmaker that requires you to be at one specific place on “Moonday, the first day of the week”, without it ever telling me when the fuck that is
It does. What it does not do, however, is give you any info regarding what bit of the week you’re in. 
This is incredibly minor and definitely a me thing than anything else, but it irks me when – in IFs where you play as an adult – the author states that the MC’s age is anything over 18, yet you can tell that they had a specific range in mind, or even an exact age.
Admittedly this only applies to a few IFs, usually fantasy ones. It can be reasonably assumed that the MC of Wayhaven is in their late twenties at youngest due to their job as a detective. But of the ones where this applies, it can be kind of annoying going in assuming I’m playing a MC in their mid twenties, as the author is on record saying that any age over 18 is applicable, only to get the increasingly obvious impression that the author wrote the MC to be in their early thirties.
Like, just share with the class what age we’re supposed to be!
