Inaccuracy: Historical Drama’s Incureable Tumor (A Nonsensical Rant)

I’ve just finished watching a marathon run on historical dramas, mostly because I’m doing research on the Elizabethan and Carolean eras…  I watched absurdly inaccurate tv series (The Tudors), to award-winning movies (Elizabeth, HBO’s Elizabeth I), and films that got a critic-bashing (The Other Boleyn Girl, To Kill a King)

And what I hated most is this:  Literary License and Bloody inaccuracy.  And worse, people love it!

By just reading the comments and blogs about historical dramas, is its really clear that people take what they see as the truth.  Very few question its veracity, so I would have hoped that the screenwriters would at least put decent effort to putting things as accurately possible.

Too much GAR?

Imagine this.

While the battle raged outside, and the blood of his comrades spilled the very ground – the dark man unhesitantly reaches for the tome. The dark codex, a demonic book filled with the malice of its infernal creators. He knew this. But he couldn’t stop now – he remembered the face of his beloved, his daughter, and the thousand years he spent in that hellish prison. All because a demon had tricked him – tricked him and destroyed everything he held dear.

Bolstered by the memory, he reaches for the book and opens it.

A great force suddenly erupted from the book, like winds echoing distant abyssal curses, promising thousands of painful deaths and tortures to the man. It struck him like a physical force, and instinctively he knew why so many people before him fell to this foul power.

“NO!!” he cried, “You will be mine! Nothing can stop me before I get what I want from you!” he challenged the book, and forced upon it his entire will, and just one tiny mistake and he will fall. “I’ve lived through centuries in the Ninth layer of hell, and none of your blasphemies scare me. I cannot be denied!”

“You’ve been watching too much GAR.” said the Gamemaster.

“Sorry,” I said. “Yes, actually… I’ve just been watching too much Bleach. But a GAR scene is just too cool to pass up.”

That Fictitious Nonsense

I have long ago, convinced myself that I will write a novel – a great one, something that would change the world… I was born with a talent with words, I never really honed it much – except that I was blessed with the love of reading. And without knowing it, my vocabulary grew, my sentences matured, my paragraphs bloomed – and before I knew it, I became a writer.

It has always perturbed me why I still haven’t written a novel. I have published many short stories, most of which was well-received by my colleagues – but these were few and far between. Yes, I used to write well. Now, I don’t know.

Each time I begin writing a piece of fiction, I always stop at the first chapter… or sometimes even the first page. And then, writer’s block would just course through me – halting everything else. Each time I write something bad, I delete the entire chapter, hating it and throwing it into the garbage can beside my computer. Then I do the process again,and again, until my garbage can has no more space for crumpled papers.

Sometime after a few failed attempts, I stopped writing altogether.