I’m gonna post this here because while I could put it up on Numb I’m behind on updating wordpress and also this concerns people with interest in things medieval and in things sims, so on a blog dedicated to Medieval-ish sim stuff, I figure this isn’t a bad place for this.
I have several things that I would like to comment on that have been floating around in my head bothering me for a long while now and I’m just going to get them out cause I’m really fucking pissed off actually.
1) REAL IS NOT BROWN! And anyone who tells you differently is full of shit. There were several very bright, very vivid dye colors available to all but the poorest souls. And by the time you get down to the poorest souls out there, the likelihood that they would have one type of cloth, from head to toe, with small patches and ones in like fabric? Highly unlikely. Their dress or tunic likely would have been patched with whatever they could find, discarded sail cloth, bit of discarded leather, fabric from another tunic or something to small.
To have an even brown fabric you have to dye it. Unbleached wool is not uniform in tone, it’s actually fairly varied, and fabric made out of it has a sorta of heathered appearance in a light beige, which is NOT BROWN! And most sheep AREN’T brown. So if your peasantry is wearing wool, they’d be wearing grays, taupes, beiges and whites. [insert chorus here].
And yes, there were brown dyes available to your average medieval person, but brown was hardly all there was available to them! So if I don’t want to dress my peasants in brown, I don’t have to and it doesn’t mean that my peasants are any less accurate for it! Get off the brown already!
2) Don’t suck the fun out of the game for everyone else! If other people want to play a fantasy-medieval hybrid, more fucking power to them. It’s a game, it’s supposed to be fun however you have fun with it, knock yourself out. But don’t piss on someone else because he or she would rather do something else.
3) If you’re going to be an accuracy Nazi, be accurate. If it takes me less than an hour on Google to find proof that you’re wrong, I’m not likely to listen to you the next time around. The Victorians were as full of shit about the Middle ages as Hollywood is. Hell, even people still in the middle ages were fanciful about ages past. Just look at what happened with the King Arthur legends! Now granted Lancelot and the Grail and the round table are fun, but they’re not accurate.
4) Research doesn’t make you God. Between people playing fast and loose with what had gone before and the laws the church had in place about all art needing to be churchly there aren’t five scholars who agree on whether the sky was blue in the middle ages so if my middle ages aren’t exactly like your middle ages, that’s okay, see above, we’re playing a game and, hopefully, enjoying what we’re doing in it. I don’t have to play your exact world. It’d be really boring if we all did.
5) José is not humble. Why does this have anything to do with anything? José has a master’s degree (and actually the better part of a doctorate) in Medieval Celtic Literature. He spent YEARS studying one relatively small time period and place of literature. (While medieval and Celtic aren’t necessarily small, he only studied a period of about 150 years in any depth.) Even he will tell you that he doesn’t know EVERYTHING about that period of literature. José never admits he doesn’t know everything, not ever. So if he says something is too massive for anyone person to know: I believe him. And that should send anyone who knows anything about my relationship with my male progenitor to the windows searching for horsemen and bunnies!! If he says the sky is blue, I go to the window to check.
6) Complaining about other people’s games is a really good way to alienate them. You’re not going to stamp out the historical inaccuracies by being a bitch. All you’re going to do is make people wonder if you ever have anything good to say about anyone. All you’re going to do is make people not want to read threads that you’ve posted in. All you’re going to do is make people (read me) scream at the top of their lungs: “Why don’t you go fuck a rabid squirrel!!” every time they see you inevitably insulting someone’s ideas or creations.
7) The truly great make you feel like you too can be great. I’ve seen a lot of posts on Plumb bob Keep that are full of good useful information. There are a lot of helpful people there, a lot of them manages to be helpful and encouraging and not sound like bitchy know-it-alls. Yet there are a few people who all I see is them dragging other people down, all I see are them being rude and insufferable. These are the people who make me feel reluctant to get involved in communities, they make me not want to share my creations, or offer advice, or help out. Some days even they make me wanna quit playing this game, go find some other game.
But unfortunately assholes are everywhere.
Glad to see I’m not the only one that feels that way. How boring is that!?! Even the poorest person thrills for colour in their life. Give me colour dammit! That’s why I’ve always been doing all those bright colours and larger-than-thou fabrics in any outfits I experiment in recolouring. Take a look at some of the illuminated manuscripts. Rarely do I see Brown as a fashion choice.
Luvin’ the story so far btw …. and enjoyed the rant too!!
Thanks, Wawa! I’m glad you’re liking stuff.
Yeah, it is nice to know you’re not alone in any belief, especially one that perhaps a majority may find unpalatable. I mean I like brown well enough, in the “guy crayon box” (The one that goes red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, white, black and brown?) one could probably describe my layout, here, as “brown”. (It’s not it’s salmon and peach, but I use the bigger crayon box.
) It’s the idea that brown is any more true to life or real than any other color that is one of my biggest pet peeves.
I love medieval paintings, there’s all those ones you’ve made into paintings and tapestries, and those images are hundreds of years old! Especially when they stopped all having to be religious, and you look at them and you see lots of color. And there’s still stuff that’s dyed using those medieval techniques, all very bright and vivid.
I can appreciate the idea behind the “dung ages” and will let anyone who wants to play that way do it, but if you tell me I can’t in my game, you’re likely to unleash the onslaught. Lol.
I also agree – and had fun stumbling across this rant. The thing about accuracy is that it’s just impossible. IT’S THE SIMS. Anyway, the middle ages were a hugely varied time. It lasted 500 years, for peet’s sake. You might as well talk of creating a world that accurately represents the western hemisphere between 1500 and now. Variety is infinite, why not gve ourselves the freedom?
And you’re totally bang on about the brown thing. That is THE thing I miss in object recolors particuarly. All that stuff looks dark because its 600 years old, not because it started that way.
On reflection, this looks rather like a rant of my own, but I had fun writing it