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

[niniane]

I'm not a huge fan of "what ifs" either unless it's really clear what has changed and that it is an AU.

I'm actually reasonably OK with the whitewashing, just as I can see it being really hard to identify with a protagonist who is a sexist, racist, homophobic twit. (As he/she probably would be in most historical worlds. And I far prefer pretending that these issues don't exist than acknowledging that they do, but that your super special little snowflake isn't a sexist, racist twit because, you know, he/she magically got hit with the PC wand.)

I will admit, though, to a certain fondness for novels that paint the past as a less than glowing place. But I can see the reason as to why a lot of stories don't go there and it doesn't particularly bother me, really. If a story is really a romance or soap opera set in Rome, I'm not sure that I need to see the hero freeing elderly slaves so he didn't have to support them now that they were useless (as historically happened on a regular basis), nor do I need a treatise on the evils of gladiatorial combat. I'm fine with it just being fluffy escapism with bits of history dabbed in. But that's obviously a huge YMMV kind of thing. (And I'll admit that one of the things I loved about the mini-series Rome was that it definitely showed a world that had very different standards and values than our modern era.)