I didn't even need to take a history class for that particular bit to have been a tripwire in my brain. I recall reading, stopping, and thinking: wait... isn't the shogun kinda like, uhm, the President? Or the prime minister? That's some pretty amazing megalomania. I mean, even latter-day aristocrats may sometimes long for (if they're old enough) their childhood days when servants bobbed curtsies and everyone called them "my Lord" and treated them with deference, but that doesn't mean they long for the days of being King when their rank has never been more than a Duke.
Not to mention it was a huge sign of lack of research to me, author's insistence aside, because a major red flag -- for me at least -- of the lack of research is a certain kind of flatness in the details. When your world is populated by "shogun", "samurai", and "everyone else", then: not enough research! Because even without knowing anything else about the history, it's still pretty safe to say that any culture is going to be far more complex than just three social classes. A story that practices such simplistic reductionism fails right there, because a fictional world needs to reflect the complex variation present in the real world. Well, at least a good fictional world needs to.
no subject
Date: 7 Apr 2010 02:50 pm (UTC)Not to mention it was a huge sign of lack of research to me, author's insistence aside, because a major red flag -- for me at least -- of the lack of research is a certain kind of flatness in the details. When your world is populated by "shogun", "samurai", and "everyone else", then: not enough research! Because even without knowing anything else about the history, it's still pretty safe to say that any culture is going to be far more complex than just three social classes. A story that practices such simplistic reductionism fails right there, because a fictional world needs to reflect the complex variation present in the real world. Well, at least a good fictional world needs to.