Quarantines and mythmaking
May. 26th, 2020 10:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
primeidealUnder a cut for people who aren't interested in any pandemic-related discussion right now. (This is primarily about events of the 1600s though, not our current situation.)
Doing some wiki-browsing a few months ago, before COVID became a large-scale issue in the US, and I ran across an article about Eyam, a village in England which became famous for its quarantine during the 1665 plague. I thought this was an interesting story, and it became the loose basis for an RPG plotline I'm currently working on.
Well, it turns out that a lot of the narrative was embellished in later centuries, both to drum up tourism and for a variety of reasons. (The author has a longer academic paper elsewhere that's bogged down in humanit-ese jargon like "unproblematic" etc. but some key points are:)
-in the short-term aftermath, people were like "the government does need to be empowered to issue social distancing orders in the event of a pandemic, because reducing the rate of transmission saves lives"
-the 1832 cholera epidemic (yes, that one) got people interested in plagues
-the cooperation of a nonconformist priest and the Anglican rector is a good example
-people who like romantic stories were moved by the rector's wife who chose to stay by him (and then died)
Ultimately the angle that was of greatest interest to me is heroic self-sacrifice, which is usually an individual story, acted out on a communal level. What does it mean to try and risk your lives for others, without knowing whether it will work? I'm hoping that the RP is able to get into those themes without being too melodramatic, but then I have the advantage of not needing to pretend it's anything other than fiction.
Doing some wiki-browsing a few months ago, before COVID became a large-scale issue in the US, and I ran across an article about Eyam, a village in England which became famous for its quarantine during the 1665 plague. I thought this was an interesting story, and it became the loose basis for an RPG plotline I'm currently working on.
Well, it turns out that a lot of the narrative was embellished in later centuries, both to drum up tourism and for a variety of reasons. (The author has a longer academic paper elsewhere that's bogged down in humanit-ese jargon like "unproblematic" etc. but some key points are:)
-in the short-term aftermath, people were like "the government does need to be empowered to issue social distancing orders in the event of a pandemic, because reducing the rate of transmission saves lives"
-the 1832 cholera epidemic (yes, that one) got people interested in plagues
-the cooperation of a nonconformist priest and the Anglican rector is a good example
-people who like romantic stories were moved by the rector's wife who chose to stay by him (and then died)
Ultimately the angle that was of greatest interest to me is heroic self-sacrifice, which is usually an individual story, acted out on a communal level. What does it mean to try and risk your lives for others, without knowing whether it will work? I'm hoping that the RP is able to get into those themes without being too melodramatic, but then I have the advantage of not needing to pretend it's anything other than fiction.
