¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Except a lot of fantasy presents itself as historical. Secondary world fantasy okay sure, do what you want (even if it is basically just Europe With the Names Changed) but a lot of fantasy bills itself as “The Napoleonic Wars, but with dragons” and “The court of Queen Elizabeth I, but with fairies!” and “Medieval Lithuania, but with elves and demons!” and go out of their way to create an elaborately detailed vision of Europe’s past.
And sure you can ignore that and eat potatoes all day long! But. If your fantasy is set in Europe, or even a heavily European-inspired world, I think it’s worth thinking about some of the common misconceptions we as a society hold about Europe.
I really believe that fantasy authors can play a role in rolling back some of the harmful, racist myths Europeans and their descendants have told about European history. For a long time Europe was seen as the home of ~civilization~ and ~learning~ and ~innovation~, and totally denied that it was also the home of colonization, imperialism, and conquest. Europeans ransacked the rest of the world for treasures, and brought them home and called them theirs. Europe has mythologized itself as a continent full of white people, natural inventors and discoverers, has erased the people of colour within it, and diminished the ones outside it.
So much of what’s considered “European” today was invented by or hugely shaped by other cultures, and our fantasy can reflect that Europe is part of a wider world and white people aren’t the only ones in it.
Sweet oranges you can peel with your hands and eat originated in Southeast Asia. Europeans got far enough east to start bringing them back in the 15th or 16th century. Or maybe a dragon brought some back from a recent trip to Sri Lanka.
Potatoes developed through ten thousand years of human domestication in the Andes mountains of South America. In our world Europeans didn’t start eating them until the 18th century, but maybe in this world humans have been crossing the Atlantic since antiquity, and ancient Roman merchants trading in the Maya city of Kaminaljuyu saw it presented as a crop from the mountains to the south.
Sparkling diamonds happened once Europeans got in contact with the advanced gemcutting techniques used in Mughal India. Instead of viewing the ~mysterious Orient~ as the origin of goods and luxuries that might as well grow on the trees, your story could acknowledge it as a place of science and learning, as the origin not just of things but of people and ideas.
Or if you want a secondary fantasy world, actually make it different from Europe, instead of having princesses in castles and knights in armour but rabbits are green and called “smeerps” and the peasants eat potatoes.
janainaart
dailybridgerton
izzy806
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stormborns
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