The Writers' Lounge

As far as fictional goes - I'm willing to steal pretty readily from the real world from fiction (to the point where it's really obvious what reference I'm using). But I tend to avoid using real world names for anything I haven't researched pretty thoroughly.

I've seen a *huge* number of novels (mostly Mists of Avalon inspired crap) that go off in these weird, alternate histories, but never really mention that things didn't work like that. (Yeah, sorry, but the druids did sacrifice humans. In inventive and creative ways! And, no, the Celts were not these sweet, peace loving matriarchs. They were a patriarchal Indo-European group, just like the Mycenaeans and the Teutons. There were some mild differences but...they still have these big epics about raiding cattle and getting drunk.) And it bugs me to no end as people read them and are like, "oh, this is how history happened" when it really, really didn't.

I can tolerate minor inaccuracies...and I can also understand some whitewashing of events (i.e. I can see how writing a world that's been as racist, misogynist, and otherwise vile as most of history might not appeal to a modern audience and I get that as a writer you may want to say...mute some of these elements.) BUT, if the writer goes off into an alternate universe, I prefer for them to at least, you know, make it clear that it's an alternate universe. Otherwise it's just fail!historical fiction, which I hate. (And which there is a LOT of out there.)

So, tl;dr, but I have a high tolerance for fantasy that rips off history to the extent that you're like "Hey...isn't this basically a retelling of what happened during the conquest of Spain?" but a very low tolerance for fantasy that pretends it existed in the real world.