Was chatting with some colleagues who are SF/F fans*, and they mentioned worldbuilding issues that can pull readers out of the story (how does Quidditch work as a sport if everything revolves around the Seeker, etc.) And someone namedropped this new-to-me blog:
A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry. The posts are (as you'd expect) extremely verbose so I've only skimmed a little. But I enjoyed this
Dune post, which examines the original novel to figure out how closely the Fremen hew to a trope he names the "Fremen myth" of the hardened warriors who defeat a more cultured, "decadent" society--usually these "histories" are written by the "decadent' culture themselves, trying to criticize their own society's perceived weaknesses, rather than a birds-eye scorekeeping of "how many battles did we win versus the other guys."
But the fact is, a lot of our evidence for the past is locked up in texts of one sort of another, so learning how to read those sources carefully and critically, drawing out the maximum of information and being wary for misinformation or deception is a key skill for a historian...When it comes to evidence, the modern historian’s problem is how to sip a useful conclusion from a fire-hose, whereas the pre-modern historian’s problem is more often how to find water in the desert.
Also,
this on (Western Christian) religion in the Middle Ages, and how Game of Thrones does (and mostly doesn't) reflect that. With a follow-up on
oaths.
What I think this show has fallen into is the assumption – almost always made by someone outside a society looking in – that the local religion is so silly that no one of true intelligence (which always seems to mean ‘the ruling class’ – I am amazed how even blue-collar students will swiftly self-identify with knights and nobles over commoners when reading history) could believe it. This is the mistake my students make – they don’t believe medieval Catholicism or Roman paganism, and so they weakly assume that no one (or at least, none of the ‘really smart’ people) at the time really did either. Of course this is wrong: People in the past believed their own religion.
Edit to add: Wheel of Time doesn't do a super-realistic job of depicting religion, IMO, since most of the "supernatural" phenomena are things that are attested in-universe, and there aren't a lot of rituals around worshipping an offscreen Creator as such. And when it comes to the Oath Rod, the Aes Sedai oaths aren't really "calling upon god(s) to punish you if you lie" but "magically putting a constraint on yourself to prevent you from doing such things in the future."
However, there are some oaths that do fit the descriptions above. In the books Siuan has an important scene involving non-magical oaths ("Under the Light and by my hope of salvation and rebirth...") and this gets blended with the Oath Rod in episode 6: "...or may my Creator's face turn from me and darkness consume my soul.") Points for accuracy! (And also Moiraine/Siuan being drama queens.)
*they also reaffirmed my suspicions that I am too shallow for the zeitgeist, but that's another story!
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seekingferret 's blog but it's come up again, so:
