More Thoughts on Fantasy

So now I've gotten my second SF book rewritten, I'm dividing my time between the third one (one of the villains paraphrases Ayn Rand and acts like Oliver Cromwell, I know, I'm so subtle) and a fantasy book. I thought I'd share some thoughts I had while doing the fantasy, a genre I'd never really sat down and done seriously before.

• So I decided to do the names in constructed languages—basically the main "classical" language is an elaborate cipher for Latin, and then I ran it through some sound and grammar changes to to create equivalents of French and Italian. I also have an equivalent of Old Norse, for the barbarians, and a related language for German.


• So said barbarians? Just cannon fodder, their men anyway; I slaughter about seventy of them just to show how elf magic works. And so what?
  
  People always act like portraying Orcs and such-like as Always Chaotic Evil (Orcs are actually listed as Lawful Evil, but whatever) is so racist and fascistical, but...peoples like the Mongols and the Vikings and the Comanche were assholes. Yes they had more going on in their culture than rape, murder, looting and enslavement, but rape, murder, looting and enslavement were their default foreign policy, even or rather especially of people who were never a threat to them. I'm sorry, but if that's how you deal with others, that's really gonna be all they notice, and the only reason not to kill you when possible is if you stop doing it. Such raids were almost always at least as bad as the worst (usually quite occasional) excesses of imperialism, and the whole point of imperialism, at least as originally practiced, is to make you a member, not to exploit you—the reverse of raids, which were mostly about exploitation even if people were occasionally adopted by their captors.
  
  The only problem in fantasy comes in when human barbarians, who behave similarly to Orcs, are supposed to be all "noble" and crap—that's hypocritical, I'll give you that, and "it's okay when I do it but not when you do it" is definitely a part of fascist-type thinking. Also of raider-cultures, who bitch and moan if you treat them even half as bad as they do you.


• Did you know most medieval cities had better sanitation than 19th century cities? Yeah, turns out they had "filth carts" go through, couple times a day, and people empty their chamber pots in 'em (no, you did not want to be that guy). A few places had people just emptying their pots in the street, as was the norm after the "Enlightenment", but it was apparently noteworthy, like taking a goat on the bus would be in America.


• What do people who write fantasy have against any form of armor other than chain and plate? In my book, the majority of humans wear chain hauberks, but with splinted bracers and greaves (and plates on the elbows and boots); the elves wear lamellar, since they're slightly based on Byzantium and Germany (the Empires, see—the latter's Emperor has one of those mobile wood-elf type courts, à la how the Holy Roman Empire had no capital). Yeah, I know, the Holy Roman Empire never really used lamellar, but the Carolingians (who founded it) did, and these ones are elves, their equivalent of Charlemagne is still alive. Nobody uses plate, though.


• It always fascinates me how people are locked into the particulars of a given culture. My civilization is based on Western Europe, but people wear Japanese-style straw hats, and the metal version (called, imaginatively, an "iron hat" both in Asia and Europe) doesn't lack prestige like it did in either place, because it looks awesome, to the objective observer. Also the men wear European style tunics tucked into pants like people wore in Sengoku Japan (Inuyasha wears them, though my guys don't usually tie the ankles closed like that), while women wear kimono-type robes with bodices over them...as seen on Yûko on about every other xxxHolic cover.


• Similarly, why are people locked into recreating European feudalism in every particular (or, more often, their illiterate caricature of it), even when magic or elves are involved? Why do mages always have a guild model? My mages are nobles, their power based on magic instead of cavalry war, and they don't have apprentices, they have squires—there still are warrior nobles, but siege-engines aren't widely developed, because you can just bring in an ally to throw fireballs. Similarly the elves (all of whom have magic equal to mages) are, each of them, nobles—basically, instead of the nobles of the Holy Roman Empire, and their retinues of knights, each domain in the elf country...has an elf. Just one. There's a few domains of human nobles within the elf-country, sorta like the Free Cities of the Empire. Human countries' aristocracies are mages or warriors, and there's a mix of systems, from an Italian-style confederacy to a French-style strong monarchy.


• Why do so few fantasy writers bother to think outside the D&D box? The number of writers who use Vancian magic, of course, but what about the fact they repeat the inaccuracies? What D&D calls a longsword is actually an arming sword (the late-Roman "spatha" that gives us the word for sword in Romance languages); a real longsword is a D&D two-handed sword (which is also called "two handed" or "two hander," the latter being its actual name in German). Nobody used the latter until the very tail end of the Middle Ages, since you still absolutely needed a shield before plate armor got good. Banded mail doesn't work the way D&D thinks it does, and there's no D&D stats for lamellar, the main Byzantine, Carolingian, and Asian armor.


• Monetary systems would be another example I came across in my research—most Europeans didn't do copper-silver-gold. For a long time French coins were all silver; a lot of places did it all in copper. East Asia used all three, actually, though they seem to have mostly used copper (or iron) and gold (mon coins, six of which are the fare across the river of the underworld, were usually copper, or iron). No European monetary system was decimal—western Europe usually went 1 pound=20 shillings=12 pennies, or the equivalent names; the Japanese one went 1 ryô=4 bu=16 shu (weights of gold)=4,000 mon, with silver coins that worked the way coins made of other things worked when everyone was on the gold standard.


• People usually object to how fantasy stories are frequently about the aristocracy, but has it occurred to them that most other fiction isn't any different? The only time you'll see accountants or housewives in fiction is if something goes pear-shaped in their lives. Cops, soldiers, and politicians have built-in job reasons to get involved with the things interesting stories are about, and nobles in premodern systems are all three combined. Besides, nobles had more money, and glasses were expensive...and I'd consider it a deal-breaker if I can't put bookish female mages in spectacles.