Anime Thread - 2012

[A Black Falcon]

Nobody wants to write about the "real" Medieval era, because the real medieval era was dirty, depressing, and dull.

The Middle Ages, still negatively stereotyped over 500 years after they ended...

Nobody went on epic adventures [except maybe to die in some faraway land during the Crusades],

There were plenty of wars and such between European nations, if that's what you mean. Of course there weren't real monsters to fight, but I never asked for reality. If you think that's what I said, you didn't read it. I said that I want internal consistency, not reality. I mean, I would love to see more accurate medieval stuff, but fantasy medieval's fine too. What I want is the world within the story to actually make sense and be plausible, and anime fantasy almost never is.

most everyone lived in absolutely squalor with no sanitation and minimal healthcare,

That was true in any historical period, medieval or no.

plagues and epidemics were common occurrence,

Lots of people died of common diseases, particularly in childhood, certainly. However, massive plagues weren't a common occurance through most of the Middle Ages. There were a series of major plagues from 550 to about 750AD, and then again in the 1300s through 1600s, both almost certainly from strains of the Bubonic Plague (ie, the Black Death plague), and coming in waves, worst the first few times but recurring for centuries in each case (the last Bubonic Plague wave was indeed in the 1600s), and killing over half of Europe's population both times...

But in between? In between there were six centuries without any major epidemic diseases, and with solid, steady population growth. Indeed, it took Europe a good while to get back to the population level it'd reached before the plague hit in the 1300s. So that's only partially true. Everyone remembers the Black Death, of course, but not the 600 years that preceded it...

serfdom was barely a step up from slavery,

True. But of course, not EVERYONE was tied to their land forever. There were merchants (they were considered the lowest order of people, even below peasants, but they did exist), nobles, etc. And some nations had peasants instead of serfs, it varied from place to place.

and illiteracy was the norm.

In the Dark Ages -- that is, the 500s through 900s -- indeed, only a very, very few people, mostly at monestaries, were literate, but in the later Middle Ages, literacy did start to spread. By the high middle ages, a fair number of nobles knew how to read at least some.

Oh, and on that note, the Dark Ages really are the forgotten age. There are almost no records from that period, so there isn't good history of it, and because of the low-tech nature of Europe at that time, the minimal literacy, etc, it's often "Justinian, then Charlemagne, then the Vikings, now we move on to the more important second half of the Middle Ages, the Middle Ages proper..." And as for games, animes, what have you? Yeah, they're almost never set in the dark ages, Western or Eastern. There are some Western fantasy books set in that period, but that's about it.

Yeah, sounds like the makings of a wonderful, lighthearted romp!

Bah, the Middle Ages aren't that bad. They always were my favorite historical period, ever since I was a little kid (I always loved "castle times"... :) ), and they still are, probably... yeah, I know that there was a general decline of civilization versus the periods before or after it, but the middle ages have been somewhat misunderstood in the past 500 years. Basically, once the Renaisance and Reformation got underway, people decided that humanity had gotten off track for a thousand years, and the Middle Ages in between should be sort of forgotten. But while there certainly are things to dislike about the period, it's not THAT bad, and it has been misunderstood in some ways. The High and Late Middle Ages, particularly, had quite a bit going on.

For one minor example, there's this stereotype that "medieval people didn't bathe", but they did. It was the 1500s through mid 1800s that saw the low point for bathing in Europe and the growth of a belief that bathing was actually bad for your health. In the Middle Ages, people would, in general, at least once ever few months, anyway.

And on another note, as I said earlier, in the later Middle Ages, there was increasing amounts of literacy. A good bit of literature written in the high and late Middle Ages survives.