Artistic license: thoughts?

[analect]

All righty... in the interests of leaving some discussion open for those who want it, I have a question. How far do you take artistic license when dealing with something in a fictional context, and how much knowledge - either of the thing itself, or in terms of acknowledgement of the license you're taking - do you expect your audience to have?

I'm sure we all have different approaches here, so I'm curious.

As a kick-off point, I recently posted a story of mine that's been kicking around for a while to my journal. The Red Man is a horror short that involves references to Celtic druidism [click to read]. Though I researched a bit for the story, I don't know a lot about either historical or modern practice - however, I do have a few druid friends.

Their religious/philosophical slant is very different to the angle the story explores (notions of Awen and bardic tradition, while awesome, are not terribly horrific). So I guess you could say, here, I've taken the same kind of artistic license that The Wicker Man (the proper film; let's pretend the 2006 remake never happened) took with ideas of preserved pagan practice; i.e., it could have happened that way.

Is this something you do with different ideas? Or are you a stickler for realism and research? Does artistic license always (or ever) mean pandering to stereotypes, or is it a useful tool for playing 'what-if' with?

Comments

[holyschist]

Well, hmmm. Modern stereotypes (allowing for variation between cultures) that have their roots in classical and medieval Christian thought, such as the beliefs that women make decisions in emotion (and that this is bad), or that women should be sexually restrained and chaste, for example. I've read Celtic-era fiction where people expressed those kinds of opinions and--well, the male heroes of Celtic myth make hot-headed decisions all the time, and the women blithely sleep around without censure (and even allowing for exaggeration on the part of the Romans, the latter is backed up with earlier historical sources). So then I find myself thinking "why do these Celts sound like medieval Englishmen/modern misogynist jerks?" and I'm thrown out of the story.

[niniane]

Some modern stereotypes have their roots in classical and medieval Christian thought. But not all. *shrugs* Definitely the idea that women are more emotional seems to come from classical thought. As did the idea that women (and men) should be restrained and chaste. (Although women often weren't assumed to be all that chaste - it was more that they should be than that they were. Many medieval primary documents seem to point out that men need to help women restrain themselves from their bestial impulses, as OMG were they ruled by lust, those crazy women!)

The Celts (or at least the Irish) definitely seemed to go for the hot headed men (who were regularly pretty stupid. Oh well...). I'd argue that the Myceneans probably did too, considering that Achilles is their main hero. And, yeah, women do sleep around (not always without censure, although sometimes), which is different. But, yeah, lots of differences. And I agree that when you get a pagan Celt behaving just like a modern day person (or Elizabethian Englishman) that it really does throw things.