Nothing I hate more than “we are showing sexual violence against women in this fantasy show to demonstrate how bad sexual violence was bAcK tHeN”.
When is “back then”, exactly? Yesterday? 1987? 1102?
Just come out with it and say it’s in there because you think audiences want to watch it, not because you are trying to make some grandiose point about a vague time in the past that never existed in the first place.
it’s so wack how it’s always sexual violence & women dying in childbirth! it’s never, like, … acne, and terrible teeth, and backaches, and smallpox scars, and infants dying of fever and young workers dying of tetanus and infants dying of diptheria and old men screaming with gout and infants dying of diarrhea and half the town getting plague pustules and infants dying of seizures and young girls permanently maimed from a broken leg and infants dying dying dying
🤔 one might think it’s not so much about authenticity but 🤔 wanting to justify sexual violence against women
I want this to be wrong, but I can’t find a single LOGICAL example that would disprove it.
There is a distinct lack of hunger, food poisoning, burns from cooking fires.
yes! absolutely. and i don’t need to see Absolute Realism in my history / historical fantasy, you know, i don’t need to see alllllllll the individual toothaches and farm accidents and cooking burns –
but. when you deliberately include a ton of sexual abuse, and call that “realism”, and don’t make any attempt to view it critically because ‘realism’ is seen as something that exists outside of art, as though it’s an objective fact and not an inherently biased intrepretation of events … it gets real goddamn bad, real quick.
i don’t think that all the writers who do this are, like, steeped in misogyny, and spend their nights cackling evily. but i do think art has an obligation – like we all have an obligation – to question what we see, and ask why it’s like that. we need to look at the atrocities we accept, and find out why we accept them, and fight back.
