If you’re going to try and make your medieval fantasy world full of Gritty Realism, then by definition you have to show the positive parts of the time period you’re trying to emulate.
People are very happy to fill their books with bloodshed, homophobia, misogyny, and a nauseating, weirdly voyeuristic (and inaccurate) amount of sexual assault, but are hesitant to touch on the artistic and philosophical legacy of the Middle Ages. Where are the musicians? Where are the frequent church-sanctioned holidays? Where are the innovators and the humourists? Where is your Gritty Realism for the good things?
There are a couple of problems with this whole approach to writing.
1) If you’re apparently going for realism in the first place, why pick fantasy?
2) Given that this is fantasy, why lean on the same prejudices as in our world? You have invented your setting, it’s entirely in your power to change the social dynamics. If you do choose a world with the same social issues that we dealt with (and still do), to what end are you showing those? So your fantasy society is, say, xenophobic…why? If you’re making a point and challenging that view to some sort of conclusion, that makes sense. If it’s there, but not explored, why have it? This is a story, and the rules are different than life. Themes that carry that much weight can’t just be laid on and left there. The issue doesn’t have to be solved, but it can’t be static.
Seconded. If there’s no joy in your “medieval” world, I’m not interested.
Copying and pasting your tags because they’re perfect:
Gardens! Colourful food! Everyone eating bacon! Apprentices going on strike because they are SICK OF EATING FISH! Books! Guilds! Festivals plays market-days and fairs and mummers and lawyers and religious arguments and dancing (and none of that TV/movie takes on the volta and all of that, oh no, gimme the peasants’ version where big hefty farmer boys tossed their big hefty gfs up into the air and caught them again) COLOURFUL CASTLES WHY ARE THEY ALWAYS DREARY AND DARK MY GOD has no one heard of tapestries. Or PAINT.
And. Let. Them. Wear. Gaudy AF. Colours.
Tangential pet peeve: why does every rebellious young woman seethe at the thought of doing needlework and long to be out doing something “important?” Dealing with cloth was a vital part of life. Think you can survive a northern European winter without a good coat? How about blankets?
Now, it’s true that weaving and sewing and so forth have been entwined with femininity since at least the ancient Greeks. But if your protagonist is rejecting weaving because she doesn’t want femininity, that’s an important character thing that needs to be examined. Definitely not something that gets casually attached to the character because rejecting the feminine is how you Do Strength.
I’m so with this. One of the things I loved about Ellis Peters’ Cadfael books was the human warmth and kindness and everyday life that infused each one alongside the mysteries and Bad Deeds.
And I’d love to see contemporary fiction and other media embrace that idea. If you’re going to call something ‘realistic’ it can’t just be dark, grim, awful, wretched all. the. time. That’s not reality in its honest form. There’s always something that makes it worth getting up in the morning, otherwise most of us would have given up the ship by now (or at least I would have).
You guys are delivering such sweet cheddar in the comments.
“Realism! The dome of St Peter’s is as real as the gasometer of East London… the passion flower is as real as the potato! … I do not object to realism in fiction; what I object to is the limitation of realism in fiction to what is commonplace, tedious, and bald - is the habit, in a word, of insisting that the potato is real and that the passion flower is not.”
–Ouida (Marie Louise de la Ramee) 19th Century novelist. Romance and Realism, 1883.
