: Re: The advantages and disadvantages of Fantasy-time Many works of the High Fantasy genre are set in a pseudo-European fantasyland, in a rather amorphous time-period that mixes early-medieval and late-medieval

@Cody1607638

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High fantasy rarely bears much resemblance to "capital H" history even when it has been inspired by a particular period as magic rather than technology tends to dominate the setting. Instead high fantasy tends to show a stylised mythological version of the past that may or may not be based in a particular period or region. If you want to use a particular era in a particular place and show it to be so you can but generally the setting of any fantasy story is only a backdrop for the story's characters and their actions so if you're writing Fantasy, as opposed to Alternate History, use what you need to get the story written since it's not the/a real world. Which in no way means it shouldn't be internally consistent but it need not be externally consistent with a specific piece of history. If you are writing Alternate History you really need to get your history spot on though because the accuracy of what you don't change is critical to selling what you do change.

In terms of writing high fantasy in non-European settings I feel that Asia and the Middle East present both opportunities and limitations. In both areas the age of mythology, when history was spoken and recorded as saga rather than date verified written account, is still relatively close to the present compared to most of Europe. This means that there is a lot more to draw on as inspiration for fantastical accounts but it also means that there is relatively little room to draw outside the accepted bounds of existing legendary accounts.

The advantage of mix-and-match history to the fantasy writer is obvious, you don't have to do deep research. As long as you're consistent you have a great deal of latitude to write history as you think it should be for a particular story in a particular place. The disadvantage is that if you're not drawing on a particular place and time you have to, depending on the tone of the piece, pay more attention to being internally consistent and/or explaining discrepancies. Discworld is notable as a piece that can ignore this completely due to it's lighthearted approach to the fantasy genre.

The advantage of using a particular time and place as a basis for fantasy is that it provides some baseline material to work from; both a historical framework that includes geographical and geopolitical relationships and a base set of mythology that has filtered down to modern times from the cultures of that time. This framework makes consistency easier and gives an author inspiration in many fields. The problem with historical accuracy is that it jars people to realise that, for example, there were still mammoths in Europe when the Egyptians were building the first pyramids. Real history is actually far stranger than most people either realise or are ready to accept so true historical accuracy runs the risk of alienating ones audience.

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