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There's a saying. "It's not what you know. And it's not what you don't know. It's what you don't know you don't know."

This trips me up a lot in classes; the number of times I've mistranslated something because I thought I recognized a word, and it turned out to be a similar but separate one that meant something completely different... (Let me tell you about when I translated three complete laws on religious restrictions about sacred groves, but translating "grove" as "flame" every time.) Or when I made some assumption on how Greek or Roman society worked, and then was corrected. It's much easier when I'm aware that I don't know something, and can just ask. Classes are for asking questions.

I've been reminded of this lately when reading about fantasy novels and video games and movies and so forth, in which people get into discussions about various choices the authors made in those books, and the, uh, "historical accuracy" thereof. Because an awful lot of the time, if someone criticizes a particular thing in some fantasy series, it'll get an angry fan response of "That's because it's HISTORICALLY ACCURATE."

Now. Setting aside the entire issue of whether "historical accuracy" is even a useful metric for including something when talking about fantasy stories, the problem here is that the people saying that are usually...wrong. Really wrong. An awful lot of the time the people claiming BECAUSE HISTORICAL ACCURACY are missing parallel situations that somehow don't come up in the exact same book, or the support structures for those historical results (when said support structures, or cultural/religious reasons for the results don't exist in that setting), or are flat-out wrong about what history was like.

And they don't know that they don't know, because they're working on a mish-mash idea of What History's Like based on vaguely remembered high school courses and some historical fiction and Hollywood movies which are, let's be honest, not known as shining examples of historical accuracy most of the time. So you get people saying with all earnestness (and often a lot of condescending sneering) things like "Well, yes, of course every single person in that video game was white, it was trying to evoke that historical period and place!" while referencing a historical period and place that was not, in fact, entirely inhabited by white people.

An author I admire once told me to question whatever assumptions came to mind when making setting and scene choices. (Why should that wizard be wearing a robe? Is there a reason for it here, or am I just doing this because Wizards Wear Robes?) It's good advice. But it's hard to apply when people talking about the stories--or worse yet, making the stories--don't even realize they're working on unconscious assumptions. And it makes for internet arguments, alas, when one points out to someone that their Totally True Historical Fact is actually an inaccurate assumption on their part.

This is also why I'm terrified to write historical fiction, despite the many ideas for it that I keep getting. Because I never feel like I could possibly do enough research to not end up with something that'd still make the real experts cringe at all my errors. But that's a topic for some other day.