Monday again, and I’m back to work after my break, and looking forward to a return to routine! And of course Fantasy with Friends is a part of that routine: all the prompts are hosted at Pages Unbound, if you’d like to join in. This week’s prompt is historical fantasy:

What are your thoughts on historical fantasy? Do you enjoy authors adding magic to real events/people or do you think they should stick to using the time setting in general as inspiration? Does historical accuracy matter to you, or are you up for anything if the plot is interesting?

I enjoy historical fantasy — for example, I loved Guy Gavriel Kay’s work in my teens/twenties (I haven’t actually read any recently), and that’s thinly veiled historical fantasy in most cases! And there’s stuff like Marie Brennan’s Onyx Court series, which I didn’t get far with but still want to read, which adds Fae to the politics of the English court. It depends on how well it’s done, of course, like anything, but I like the idea of historical fantasy.

In general, I’m fine with adding magic to the Elizabethan court or vampires to the French Revolution, but I probably draw the line somewhat at events and people in living memory — it just feels weird. Magic in WWII in general, yeah, fine, but I think there are a lot of ways to go really wrong and be really disrespectful with that. The period also isn’t my thing anyway; I prefer my history to be a bit more historical.

More generally, I think one has to be really careful to avoid leaning into othering and stereotypes when dealing with minorities in the past… while also avoiding their erasure. You probably shouldn’t make a foreign-born king into an evil werewolf or a notably queer king into an evil seductive vampire who preys on the young men of his court (for reasons that should be apparent– though such things can also be fertile metaphors for exploring belonging, so I’m not saying it can’t be done well.

I’m not enormously worried about historical accuracy in fantasy: since a lot of the premises are being changed, then a lot of the results would also inevitably change. It helps to create a solid grounding if you have mostly the same monarchs or placenames or whatever, but beyond including enough constants to properly place us in the period you want to evoke… go nuts!