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Comment by ClumsyPilot | Hacker News Reader

I can't help but feel we've entered into a perverse loop where we make movies / games only pander to stereotypes of their viewers, and we breed ignorance.

First of all art seems to be obsessed with medieval European, and all other periods and places are forgotten. The only other period that gets showtime is antiquity in rome/egypt/greece (which is more or less one period).

We have a catch 22, that noone knows whats been happening in ancient China or India, and so movies about them are few and far between.

Art is meant to elevate and educate.

Perhaps this has entered terminal stage because holywood and AAA studios cant even bothered to write a new plot any more, they just make endless remakes

Insert some grumble about late stage capitalism

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What's crazy to me is Hollywood is more focused on casting non-white actors in medeival fantasy roles rather than actually making culturally diverse movies. Chinese, Indian, and African history is fascinating and I would love to see more media exploring those settings.

Just setting something in a powerful nation of early medieval or pre-Roman times would make it naturally non-Eurocentric. Eastern Roman empire, Sasanian or older Persian empires, Alexander's Asia, Ethiopia, Pontus, Artaxiad Armenia, Baktria, pre-delenda'd Carthage, golden age Islamic empires, archaic Mesopotamian kingdoms, (further eastern empires that I'm honestly not educated about), ...

"Córdoba was a city that had street lighting and paved streets while London was still just a village." - Prince Faisal in Lawrence of Arabia

My wild guess is that most AAA/Hollywood creators are completely clueless about those cultures and histories and the effort required to do research to hit a level of accuracy outweighs the budgets they have, so we're stuck with culturally diverse medieval ages. furthermore, i imagine the PR agencies that tell them that they're going to be wrecked and dragged all over the internet if they do some Persian themed thing and get something wrong. add that all up and they probably decide it ain't worth it.

I'm sure they can figure out the history well enough to depict it, or punt on the accuracy. They probably figured it wouldn't be a popular enough setting for the intended audience.

It's been done a few times. Prince of Persia was set in a fantasy land without a real attempt at historical accuracy, but it was sorta Sasanid Persia. Similarly, Aladdin in Iraq. There was also the 2004 Alexander which was quite accurate, but it wasn't a good movie. And Lawrence of Arabia, sorta fictionalized but accurate in spirit, which was the best.

300 was interesting cause they made it clear the story was being told from the Greek perspective by having Dilios narrate it, and he hyped it up even more than the actual Greek historians did, instead of the movie presenting it as a factual view. The movie still pissed off the Iranian government, but whatever.

Oh yeah, Mulan too.

I have a thing for filling in gaps in my knowledge. Eventually one will bother me and I'll have to learn. Just before COVID started, it was non-Eurocentric history. I realized I knew the world as seeing the Persians as the decadent outsiders and didn't know anything "east" of there.

I've spent a lot of time learning about China, the Mongols, Persia, and actual Ancient Egypt. I've dabbled in general Islamic history. I have so much more to cover, but it's what I could find thorough work on easily. I like to start with pre-history and go forward where I can.

It's crazy to me. There are so many compelling stories. And what we have in our media is so insanely off-base.

Side request: Any recommendations for podcasts and resources for some of the various Indian cultures and Russia would be much appreciated. I prefer a bias of "from their eyes" to "from a Western perspective."

https://witcher-games.fandom.com/wiki/Baked_potato

The same kind of "and not even accurate medieval Europe" complaint as the article, when I do agree with you that the myopic focus on Europe is more important, but... the introduction of the potato was so influential to social relations that it is kind of appalling to consider how casually it's used in supposedly pre-Columbian settings!

Isn't the Witcher set in a wholly fantastic, non-European, realm? Like, obviously to some degree inspired by European fantasy, but it's not like there's an America to go to and bring back the potato from.

The Witcher is my specifically chosen example because people famously lost their minds about the Netflix adaptation moving to cast characters in it as nonwhite. ...because It Is Supposed To Be Based On Medieval Poland, Of Course. So you can see the weird tensions around the "historical accuracy" of fantasy – people have strong reactions, pretty high-stakes stuff.

If you hadn't heard of this, there's a lot of press coverage, but here's a petition with 50k signatories. https://www.change.org/p/lauren-s-hissrich-don-t-limit-ciri-...

(If anyone is considering commenting about their opinions on this kind of casting being Good or Bad, let's not – the point is that the Witcher's "historical accuracy" is something people have a lot of feelings about.)

Fun fact, Andrzej Sapkowski only specified a few characters' skin color when it was important to note that they were from the same region as Geralt of Rivia. Otherwise, the only big note is that Zerrikanians have sun-blackened skin (as in deep black like you'd find in many parts of central Africa). Everything else is basically just commentary on hair styles and especially hair dyes. Very little time is spent in his books discussing natural hair colors or skin color with the exception of people very far to the north, Geralt, and the Zerrikanians. In interviews back before the video games were made, (I'm going to paraphrase here), he basically said that the skin colors and hair colors were as diverse if not more diverse than Earth and because of the ease of travel for anyone aided by magic users, you could expect to find tons of diversities in any of the cities and even in large towns. As for the magic users and witchers, they'd be as diverse as the world itself as they were trained from all parts of the world.

Which is a hilarious detail to protest about. Given the whole antagonist fraction was changed from a corporatist technocracy to a theocracy.

Correct, it makes as much sense to complain that Hobbits like potatoes.

When the media is based around folklore from a particular region, it's understandable to want it to match the region. I don't care about the casting, but if there were redcoat musketeers and samurai-looking warriors in a movie loosely based on old German fairy-tales, it'd be weird.

There are plenty of films produced in China and India about historical periods in China and India... watch them?

Likewise there are few films in those markets set in historical European eras.

A place tends to make films regarding their own cultural heritage, is this a problem or are you going to start complaining about the lack of Bollywood productions about King Arthur?

I would bet China and India's film industries aren't great on historical accuracy either. The past tends to be a strange, different country, where people care about a ton of unsexy stuff which we don't care for, and vice versa.

That's not ideal for engaging stories, let alone courting nationalist audiences.

India has booming film industries, but I haven't looked into historical film. I'm normally there for the escapism. The fact that it's considered A place or A heritage is another problem. It's more diverse than Europe. Heck, often languages are closer to European languages than they are to the neighboring region. I wish I knew a lot more about that than I do.

China has some pretty serious issues with the government's projection on their own history and their ability to dictate what is or is not made. Minor example: a Tang period film required a change to not period-accurate clothing because it was too immodest. Sorry, I can't remember the name.

And the Romans are British-looking people who wear nothing but red, while Egypt's contemporary Ptolemaic period often gets mixed up with some much older era.

Btw, there are 11 Spiderman movies by now. Wtf.

Are movies about ancient China or India made in China and India? Is the claim that they aren't made, or that "noone" knows about it, itself myopic?

Obviously trying to get Hollywood stories to cover broader things is a big topic, and one I think is important for people in the US, but Hollywood is also not the be-all-and-end-all of the world.

> rome/egypt/greece (which is more or less one period).

That's like saying Moghul India and Raj India and British-era Hong Kong were "all one period" because they kind of sort of overlapped in space and time.

When people think of Rome, they tend to unknowingly think of a period of Roman expansion from like 200BC to 1AD where Egypt and Greece were independently ruled for some time before Rome conquered both, which also happens to be near the start of Christianity. That's why "Rome/Egypt/Greece" is a thing.

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