hello, hello! i saw something you’d reblogged, and in the tags you noted that writers need to make sure they get their au eras correct (e.g. regency vs victorian). while this is totally valid, i’d like to respectfully and creatively challenge this. especially when considering anachronistic blending (really brought to light during postmodernism) that particularly imaginative creative writing can implement. this hybridity and borrowing of different eras—when sprinkled into fic—keeps narratives fresh and intriguing, and works to mitigate carbon-copy storytelling.
Brit! Hello! I always love seeing you in my inbox.
You raise a very valuable point. The first thing that comes to mind is Vonnegut’s purposeful blend of time & space in Slaughterhouse 5 — telling and retelling and blurring the lines of fact, myth, and the present through the appropriation of various historical themes.
I appreciate what you’re saying about keeping fic fresh - there’s something to be said about lending from disparate eras to create a wholly unique world in which the characters inhabit and which the readers experience. I’ve been known to do that myself, and it’s a very valuable creative technique.
I think the difference comes, however, when the fic author decides to slap a unique label on their historical au. They do that because it’s lending context and meaning, no? As a reader, I then expect the fic to live up to the label. They’re drawing upon that epoch for a reason.
In the specific case of Regency vs Victorian — those are completely different historical eras with vastly different norms, customs, political climates, etc. there’s a difference between labeling something as vaguely historical and then referencing a very specific era with defined dates. While I don’t expect everything to be perfect, or for an author to spend lots of time researching, those are distinctly different time periods. It’s like saying that pre and post WWII America are the same. If you really wanna make a point, like Vonnegut, go ahead, by all means do that. But in conventional fic writing doesn’t make sense.
[edit: post in question linked here]
