Date: 2011-09-15 04:47 pm (UTC)
holyschist: Image of a medieval crocodile from Herodotus, eating a person, with the caption "om nom nom" (Default)
From: [personal profile] holyschist
Oh yeah, definitely. Although even though the Tain is written in a Christian era, it doesn't have the Official Church Line on women at all, which I find rather fascinating. But there's always going to be a lot of extrapolation that far back, barring the invention of a time machine.

(I love really good, interesting magic systems where the magic is coherent and comes with a price--or small and everyday and like tech, but not deus ex machina useful--but those stories seem to be rather rare.)

With fantasy there's definitely more leeway. Bump the invention of velvet earlier? Sure! Base a culture on a culture with slavery but remove the slavery? Sure (although consider the ripple effect this will have--fantasy Rome without slaves would look quite, quite different from just Rome without slaves, and that could be interesting to explore)!

(One of my irks is alternate history like "Rome never fell" that assumes that slavery still exists, but so does pretty much all the modern tech we use now. I'm not at all convinced that a society dependent on slave labor would ever develop all the labor-saving tech we use, or that a society that developed that labor-saving tech would need slaves--or want to deal with the drawbacks of having them, like the constant threat of slave revolts. Machines don't revolt or require expensive wars to acquire large numbers of captives to operate them when you could pay a few poor people to do so instead. It's all about thinking through the logical effects of changes to society, and how real societies work.)

I could buy a Roman lady who has a problem with slavery--there are people in very era who question the underpinnings of society--but it really depends on how it's done. And "self-esteem" and ball gowns had better not come into it.
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