Calling it erasure sounds like a huge overreaction to me, honestly.
Yeah, the problem with this post is I was figuring out what I thought while I wrote it, and didn't express myself very well. (I'm still figuring that out, btw, so take this comment with a grain of salt :)) I can see how it would be a bit irritating, sorry about that :/
What I meant was: I think the fact that it doesn't occur to fantasy writers (or me, until recently) to even consider having a group like the jews in their story is a symptom of the way jews don't play a part in most people's mental picture of medieval europe. Which I don't think is neccesarily a sign of racism so much as a symptom of how generally over-simplistic and crap most people's understanding of the past is (including mine).
Really, to make any sense this post needed to be preceded by me getting a good hold on what fantasy is and what relationship it has to real history (such a hold I do not have). Maybe I should do a post on that instead :)
Also I got a little sidetracked by my ongoing dissatisfaction with how unimaginative and same-y most fantasy is: Personally I prefer fantasy which, while not neccesarily actually true, feels true and real, and I find this tends to happen when the author does some research and takes some of the more interesting and underused bits of history as inspiration.
Other than that I just like going "Hey, here's a fairly obvious type of story noone seems to be telling, why is that?".
no subject
Yeah, the problem with this post is I was figuring out what I thought while I wrote it, and didn't express myself very well. (I'm still figuring that out, btw, so take this comment with a grain of salt :)) I can see how it would be a bit irritating, sorry about that :/
What I meant was: I think the fact that it doesn't occur to fantasy writers (or me, until recently) to even consider having a group like the jews in their story is a symptom of the way jews don't play a part in most people's mental picture of medieval europe. Which I don't think is neccesarily a sign of racism so much as a symptom of how generally over-simplistic and crap most people's understanding of the past is (including mine).
Really, to make any sense this post needed to be preceded by me getting a good hold on what fantasy is and what relationship it has to real history (such a hold I do not have). Maybe I should do a post on that instead :)
Also I got a little sidetracked by my ongoing dissatisfaction with how unimaginative and same-y most fantasy is: Personally I prefer fantasy which, while not neccesarily actually true, feels true and real, and I find this tends to happen when the author does some research and takes some of the more interesting and underused bits of history as inspiration.
Other than that I just like going "Hey, here's a fairly obvious type of story noone seems to be telling, why is that?".