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I loathe that kind of romance. I’ve seen it more often than not in IF, though.

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Essentially, don’t have the ROs be part of your cast, just because. Like, if I could safely remove the character from the story entirely with no effect on the plot of the story, then they should be removed.

One story that I thought did this well was the Golden Rose; the companions weren’t just redundant filler characters, they had roles and plot lines in the story that activated and were relevant even without romance.

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I agree, if I wanted many, varied ROs without my actions towards them affecting the plot, I would be playing Wayhaven or Keeper of the Sun and Moon.

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My god, space this out.

I want to read your comment but, I get lost every time I look away from the screen.

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Sorry, I’ll readily admit and apologize for my lack of proper writing ability. I’ll also take your criticism into consideration as I know that is an area I need to improve, but I’m not going to edit my posts for this since I tried my best to word my thoughts and I know I’ll try to correct things or add things, and I’d rather not butcher my points by trying to add new things to them

Edit 2: Also I spent most of the day doing those posts last time and would rather avoid doing that again for the same post, if I can, since all I accomplished that day was two rants on a forum

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I’d agree that cultural homogeneity is a serious issue in a lot of fantasy stories. That’s why I usually try to plan out a whole history from the rise of sedentary agrarianism, to better represent cultural diffusion. Once you’ve mastered a few basic environmental rules, like only big river basins support large regions of a single culture, then it’s a lot easier to figure out exactly how different kingdoms would grow and develop. I’ve found it’s a much more mature way to world-build than the One Country One Gimmick that some people are fond of.

On a side note, not having diversity just makes no sense in most settings. The problem is that people always underestimate the amount of diversity there actually was in many given situations - for example, Sikh soldiers fought in the Western Front of WW2 and even back in the Qin Dynasty Greek art styles had already traveled all the way to China. If your fantasy world has any hot climates, then it logically needs people of color because pale skin is better for vitamin retention but is awful for preventing skin cancer. It’s more often than not a plot hole to not have people of color rather than “forced diversity.” You’re right though, it should obviously always be organic.

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Diversity isn’t the issue for me: It’s when they start putting diversity in for diversity’s sake and nothing else. For instance, if somebody writes a story about a group of dark-skinned people living in a frozen polar region, I’d like to see a good, logical reason why they’re living there in the first place. What’s written into a story should adhere to a consistent train of logic rather than due to a personal political agenda.

And yes, the world’s cultures and ethnic lines are often far more blurred together rather than sharply demarcated. A lot of the food we eat today, for instance, are the result of cultural/commercial osmosis and adoption in multiple directions.

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A lot of things in fantastical, fictional settings are never logically explained. I personally don’t need the skin color of a group of people explained in the text unless it is actually relevant to the plot and/or characters, and I’m not going to make an assumption that they’re darker skinned because of some political agenda. Sometimes it is just nice to see people that look like you or are like you in fiction.

In my free time, I write about a society of female warriors. I never give a reason in the text why the majority of the fighters are women, and it’s not political—if someone pressed me about it, I would legitimately just say “because it was cool and I want to see more women warriors.”

That’s definitely a hill I’m already dead and buried on.

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What’s the political agenda exactly, I wonder? What’s being pushed with the presence of the insidiously different people? If the answer here is “oh, they want money,” I suppose the James Bond franchise was overwhelmingly political all along then? And Michael Bay films?

The Inuits are…a figment of all our imaginations? And I don’t know about you, but not everything has to become Ancient Civilizations and Geographical Relocation 101 every time I read a book. Real life basically arbitrarily exists so what’s the insurmountable deal about the internal logic that is consistently “this is how it is because it is”? I guarantee you if I went up to a random person and asked them why they and their family are X race, they might have a variety of answers or they might not but what they wouldn’t tell me is a thorough history of the whole Earth’s demographic exchange patterns unless they happened to be a strangely prepared historian.

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How it’s stupid if the character is automatically super powerful which leaves hardy any room for growth.

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Yep, makes sense to me. But most of the time if you want your story to be interesting at all there has to be some degree of different environments, which logically extends to diversity.

I’d consider the Inuit dark-skinned if you say the Tatars or other native Siberians are. My point isn’t that diversity is bad and inherently political, it’s that it’s inherently illogical to have a diverse setting without diverse peoples and cultures.

I’d have to disagree with you there. They’d have to both be super powerful and know to use their powers well and succeed at almost everything with them. There’s a lot of great examples of heroes in fiction growing through maturing in their use of great power. Spider-Man and Korra, for example. If you want to go farther back you have Odysseus and Cao Cao.

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Yeah but Korra was already able to beat multiple enemies in Episode One, but I have to give you Spider-Man. But Naruto was so weak in Episode One which made his journey so long and rewarding to get to his level.

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You can’t change history because it doesn’t fit with your story. There is nothing I despise more than people doing ridiculous things in a irl historical setting that makes no sense for the time. For instance whenever there’s a southern character in a historical fiction around the American old west, they’re all “I was fighting for my home and I released my slaves cause its the right thing to do.” Or some bullshit like what battlefield 2 did with the British prosthetic arm super woman sniper they showed off.

If you wanna make story in a historical setting but start messing with the events to fit it, just make a story world that is inspired by the period, like the infinity series or Diaspora did. Thats the difference between good and bad historical fiction in my opinion.

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History is changed almost every day, for too many reasons to count.

For example: Until last week, ceremonial chariots were never confirmed for Romans. Not once, for over a thousand years, until last week did we know anything about this. Last week, everything we know changed.

History changes with what is accepted, what is known and what is understood.

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That doesn’t excuse willfully ignoring or changing what is generally accepted as fact. In fairness ancient history has some leeway precisely because we do know so little, but talking high middle ages onwards we have a pretty solid grasp on what life was like socially certianly in Europe, and most of the world.

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Again we are going to have to disagree, especially in a thread where we both are on writing related “hills to die on.”

For example: Aspirin is a drug invented by Bayer in 1899. This is generally accepted fact.

Except it is much more complicated than this. It is very much in the realm of possibility that aspirin could have, and perhaps should have been invented sooner.

As a historical-fiction author, it is your task to write believable changes and believable differences from what is “accepted as fact.”

You seem to be a student of war… and as such, I hope you would be able to roll with changes made to “accepted fact” involving war in historical fiction.

Details are often out of focus or not focused on at all, and these details are what a historical fiction writer needs to play with in order to have a creative story.

What life was like, socially may have explicitly known at the time it was lived, however there was too much that was not written, recorded, photographed, or whatever. For example (I use this example a lot) but most Americans think that same-sex relationships were not accepted in the Victorian era… but the truth is very different than what most Americans “accept as fact.”

This is troubling to me because “as racist as it was, no less and no more” is something that changes.

Six children’s books written by Dr Sues in the earlier part of the 20th century (1930-1970s) are today considered racist. Back in the 1980s, the opinion of Americans were divided. In the 1970’s the opinion of Americans was that these books were not racist.

So which version of “racist as it was, no less and no more” is a historical writer to use as their standard?

If the story being written takes place in the 1990’s, does a writer in today’s world take a different version than if she were writing a setting taking place in the 1950’s?

It is my core belief that it is the historical fiction writer’s duty to make a world that hooks their audience into it and keeps it there.

There are no generalities to fall back on as a historical fiction writer… and that is my point.

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Yes, of course, I agree in the sense that historical fiction’s job is to play in the grey unfocused corners of known history. Still, there is a caveat to that in the sense that it is the author’s duty to convey the history around those grey areas as truthfully as possible. For instance, a couple of months ago, someone on the forum here posted an open question on how racists is too racist for a story they were setting in old west America, and I think that is a profoundly ignorant question, you should make try and make it as racists as it was no less and no more. I truly despise the whitewashing and shying away from real history to make it more digestible to modern audiences. Humans have changed profoundly over the last generations, which needs to be shown. You don’t have to agree with someone to respect them or empathize with them.

There are grey areas of history, and I don’t mean to suggest stories should parrot everything that happened, but that the reality of history isn’t hidden.

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I will always argue that talking a pragmatic villain down on moral grounds is a boring ass thing.

I don’t care what you tell me, people who genuinely believe themselves to be the ones HELPING the world will NEVER, and I mean NEVER, be dissuaded by being told “This is not the right thing to do”, ESPECIALLY if it’s the hero, AKA their ENEMY saying that.

You know what IS interesting? Facing a pragmatic villain with pragmatism.

Not telling them that their plan is morally wrong, but instead, telling them, and showing them, that their plan for the world is not sustainable and that they are doomed to fail.

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For one thing, I never denied that dark-skinned people exist in a polar region (Your chosen response might be partly due to my poor choice of words, which I will take responsibility for). It should also be noted however that the Inuit marine-based diet does tend to compensate somewhat for the fact that their darker skin is a disadvantage in vitamin D production. The point I was trying to make was more akin to, say, finding a person from the Korean peninsula in the 1500s and seeing them smack dab in the middle of Europe at the same time period without having any properly written reason as to why they were there.

Second, your claim that real life arbitrarily exists is not something I can agree with (And this coincides with literary hills we prefer to die on, so all the more power to you and your literary stance). For me, every action has a consequence and every result has a cause (Not necessarily a cause fueled by sentient intent, but that’s another rabbit hole that I prefer not to go into right now due to how much off-topic conversation it would likely fuel). I personally consider that whatever you cannot explain doesn’t mean it exists ex nihilo (out of nothing), only that it lies out of our ability to understand or grasp.

This doesn’t mean that I want the story to go into agonizing detail over every little thing in a fantasy world (Unless you’re shooting for something akin to Tolkein, but then that’s something else), but at least I would like the setting to make some sort of sense as to why something exists if you’re going to attach significance to it for the reader to note.

The best (at least in this man’s sole opinion) science-fiction and fantasy-based worlds may not necessarily adhere completely to the natural laws that exist in our world (Hence why they are called fantasy and science-fiction), but they do display a certain consistency in how they work.

If there are different environments involved in the scope of the world you are writing about, absolutely. (It certainly would seem unacceptable to me, for instance, if you wrote a story that centered around the lands of Russia and only had people of eastern European ethnicity in it… Russia’s a pretty darn big place!)

I would argue that sometimes even using pragmatism isn’t going to dissuade said villain from turning away from their goal (Especially if there’s a sunk-cost fallacy involved with personal pride into the mix).

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That’s fair.

But still, I feel like I’d enjoy a lot of writing more if the hero’s argument against the villain was more complex and pragmatic than “He’s evil”.

Even if the argument doesn’t work on the villain, it would still be interesting to at least think about and it shows that the author put a lot of thought into their world.

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