I have such mixed feelings about tags like "period typical attitudes" and "period typical homophobia.":
1) "period typical" really flattens centuries of human experience. It's also constantly abused to justify ahistorical depictions of prejudice—often projecting relatively modern (read: 20th-century USAmerican) frameworks of bigotry backward onto vastly different cultural contexts. There's really nothing "typical" about collapsing 500 years of varied attitudes across dozens of cultures into one homogenous past.
2) the anachronism. People in the HRE in 1403 were not even remotely conceptualizing sexuality through homo/hetero binaries. They literally didn't have that cognitive framework. The modern identity categories we use to understand queerness are themselves political and epistemological tools that don't merely limit our understanding of the past—they also shape the present creation and articulation of desire globally.
BUT HERE'S MY CONTRADICTION: I still use these tags in my own fic because they're a practical, widely-understood way to signal to modern readers "this is not set in 2025, and the writing will reflect that." It's meant to be a navigational tool, not a historical disclaimer.
Neither Hans nor Henry would recognize the words "bisexual" or "gay," but they sure as hell are. The question is: how do we write historical queerness without either 1) playing into modern identity labels, or 2) erasing the lived reality (struggle, joy) of queer desire across history?
I'm curious....how do other folks navigate this? Does fandom's compulsive need to label and categorize everything sometimes corner us into bad historiography? When are tags a courtesy or a crutch? How do you balance historical authenticity and like reader accessibility?
There has been some discussion (though not enough), along with shouts, whispers, and sincere questions. Among those I believe are worth addressing: what do we mean when we talk about “Anglicized / USAmerican Puritanical attitudes towards sex?”
Language Holds History
The way we express something reflects not only the content but also how we articulate it.
English bears the historical load of a language influenced by Protestant Christian moral values. This heritage—still prevalent in global communication—has an inheritance that is neither wholly universal nor solely medieval in origin.
When we say fandom is “Puritanical,” we are not referring to religion or Christianity in general. Instead, we point to a specific historical legacy rooted in English Puritanism and Victorian moralism—attitudes still evident in modern Anglo-centric cultures (think the UK, USA, and all the formerly colonized territories that once formed part of the British Empire), despite claims of secularism.
What does puritanism look like in practice? It frames sexual purity as a measure of moral character (virginity vs. deviancy). It treats sex itself as dangerous, shameful, or corrupting. It relies on strict binary categorization: pure/impure, natural/unnatural, permissible/forbidden. And it insists that sex should be justified, sanitized, or punished.
Fandom is obsessed with labelling things. And it leads to an intense policing of desire—especially queer desire. See endless position talk, sexuality labels, what’s “explicit” and what’s not.
I speak as someone who frequently engages with both “Western” and “Eastern” cultural traditions—and notice how that binary immediately influences our thinking. What lies on the other side of the Western/Eastern slash? When we rely on existing frameworks, what power structures are these upholding? Although KCD is a Czech property, the main language of discussion and consumption, especially online, is English. And English-speaking fandom—including KCD—can treat these cultural assumptions as default, or sometimes “historically accurate,” even when they're not.
Puritan Manifestations
It’s a complex constellation of things occurring all at once, but the pattern is fairly recognizable:
The demand that sex MUST be morally justified. Fandom often insists on explaining why or how a character should be sexually active, how sex fits into their moral arc, and providing proof that characters should truly “deserve” intimacy—rather than sex existing as a normal part of human life.
While I certainly praise AO3’s robust tagging system and the empowerment it offers to writers and readers, these are modern tools that fandom sometimes treats as moral judgments rather than simple content identifiers. Are E-rated works more taboo than M-rated ones?
Some examples of 21st-century sexual anxieties include the insistence of marriage and monogamy as the ideal unit for sex, the assumptions about prudishness and shame, and about treating queer sex and love as inherently “more” sinful or secretive by default. All of these assumptions run counter to the fact that, for the most part, we don't know what the past is really like. And tend to gloss over the sensual mysticism, the erotic poetry, the bawdy humour, and confessional practices of Medieval Christian life.
Queer relationships, and sex especially, are often seen as morally questionable unless portrayed as “tragic” or “forbidden.” This doesn’t mean there aren’t fans who equally enjoy depictions of queer joy, pleasure, domesticity, and pain without a moral struggle attached. However, a lingering discomfort with imagining such subjects means some elements seek historical “evidence” of persecution before they can accept queer romance—as if queer desire requires suffering to be legitimized.
The hyperinflation of same-sex touch and its taboo within fandom means that physical affection: a same-sex kiss, a shared bed, shared clothes, an embrace—all instantly get coded as sexual or angsty. Fandom’s baseline assumptions about bodily intimacy are deeply Anglo-American and anti-touch.
Puritanical sexual cultures are obsessed with taxonomy and classification, pure/impure, saved/damned, penetrative/non-penetrative, man/woman, top/bottom. These binaries don’t just shape moral frameworks; they shape how we imagine the self. When these attitudes migrate to English-language fandom spaces, they create an environment where sex is constantly categorized (oral, anal, intercrural, is there cum?), and all intimacy requires explanation. Queerness is only legible through modern terminology.
This urge to label a character as “gay,” “bisexual,” “cis,” “pan,” “homoromantic,” or even to invoke “period-typical homophobia”—even when those labels aren’t explicitly present or mentioned in the story—reflects an attempt to clarify ambiguity, define meaning, and make desire understandable through a familiar framework.
But that creates a historical flattening.
What This Means for Hansry
Fandom insists on relying on a Puritan-coded modern worldview, retroactively imposing categorizations on characters who could not have used them.
It’s why queer romance must be framed with persecution to feel “valid.”
It’s why some people panic if Hans and Henry’s affection resembles brotherhood.
It’s why sex is treated as a moral crisis rather than an embodied aspect of life.
It is all part of a larger discomfort with opacity.
As Édouard Glissant writes, “the right to opacity” is the right of persons, cultures, and histories to remain irreducible—to resist being fully translated into the dominant categories of interpretation. Medieval queer desire sits precisely in that space, that precipice: it’s recognizable, but not necessarily nameable, not always classifiable, and not easily slotted into modern identity grids. And fandom reacts to opacity with anxiety.
In any purity-based culture, the unclassifiable becomes immediately suspect—that which cannot be labelled is dangerous, or morally fraught. Is it gay or brotherly? Is it “period-typical homophobia” or inaccurate? Is it acceptable or forbidden?
These questions don’t emerge from neutral historical inquiry. Fandom often projects modern sexual anxieties backwards. It isn’t just an issue of “accuracy”—it’s an issue of how the 21st-century Anglo-American sexual imagination restricts what stories are allowed to be in the name of “history,” it narrows the interpretative space so severely that the past becomes a mirror of present fears rather than its own contradictory reality.
That’s why I ultimately keep returning to Glissant and the idea of embracing opacity, multiplicity, and the past without forcing them into neat categories. It’s not that labels are inherently bad, but when they become mandatory—when desire is constantly sorted and ambiguity is shunned—we lose something vital.
We lose the idiosyncrasy of history, the capaciousness of human desire, the possibility of imagining queerness beyond what we can imagine. The game’s own writing is much more relaxed, playful, ambiguous, and messy—closer to the expansive medieval past we can only imagine. And fandom’s great irony in bending to “history” is that we lose what makes Hansry so compelling in the first place.
They split a chicken at the tavern. Grease and wine and Hans's fingers on Henry's wrist—deliberate, claiming. The walk to Pirkstein has never felt longer.
In Hans's chambers, they make a different kind of feast for each other. And discover that some hungers can't be sated with a single taste.
The wine you offer takes me out of my self into the self we share. Doing that is religion.
Recovering from the hunt, Hans Capon invites one, Henry of Skalitz, to accompany him to the local baths—a tale of wine, water, and what befell them there.
—
Hans's POV of the titular quest.
He killed for me. Hans thinks, watching Henry pocket the severed ear wrapped in yellow silk. Behind them, bodies cool in the clearing. Ahead, miles of forest and the long road to Rattay. Between them—something neither of them dares name, twisted together like rope and blood and the weight of a trophy pressed close.
A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast: but the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel.
The Chief takes Erik hunting in the third week, or maybe the fourth. In the forest, with a dying buck at his feet and a knife in his hands, Erik learns what it means to kill. He learns what the Chief has been teaching him all along.
A lesson he will carry for years. This knife. This moment. He will remember everything the Chief taught him about the art of the hunt.
And he will use every lesson.
Hey, would it be crazy if I rewrote my version of The Prey from Henry's POV??? Would that be wild or what?? Would it be crazy to weave it into a sequence of conversations and mundane instances?
