4 ms·

Sure, but those themes are drawn out via the facts of the story which have direct historical parallels. It seems like the Arabic elements are just window dressi

Sure, but those themes are drawn out via the facts of the story which have direct historical parallels. It seems like the Arabic elements are just window dressing and you could swap them out without affecting the story. But because it is drawing on real world events, even if you aren't aware of the history, you lose something if you try to make it more generic. The proof is the movie version (at least Part I). The fremen feel less like an actual society with a coherent culture because they removed anything that tied them to the Middle Eastern. I think this is true of fantasy in general, because the progenitor of the modern genre was Tolkien, a huge history/linguistics/mythology nerd. And one can easily argue that he set the precedent of taking history (often the middle ages) and imbuing it with the mythic/religious elements that people told stories about. Look at GRRM and A Song of Ice and Fire. One of the subplots is basically, "What if Chinggis Khan was a chump who died but he had a blonde child bride that accomplished all the shit that he did in real life." Again, I don't think that makes his books bad, but in my experience, the more you study history, the more you realize how the real creativity of fantasy writers is what pieces of history and mythology they crib and recombine.

vkou 3y ago
All stories of note have historical parallels, but I think it's fair to say that there have been new bits of history since then, that would heavily distract from the meaning of the work, if the window dressing stayed the same. AGOT would hit a little differently if it just so happened that there was a horrifying civil war caused by a poorly planned incestuous relationship sometime in the 2010s. I've just seen the second film, and I think it does many of the book's messages justice (Great Man in particular). Perhaps you can criticize that removing the window dressing has destroyed some of the setting's cohesion. It's a reasonable argument. But I do think that the film would lose more if was buttressed with an allegorical context for, uh, more recent world history.

vkou 3y ago

All stories of note have historical parallels, but I think it's fair to say that there have been new bits of history since then, that would heavily distract from the meaning of the work, if the window dressing stayed the same. AGOT would hit a little differently if it just so happened that there was a horrifying civil war caused by a poorly planned incestuous relationship sometime in the 2010s. I've just seen the second film, and I think it does many of the book's messages justice (Great Man in particular). Perhaps you can criticize that removing the window dressing has destroyed some of the setting's cohesion. It's a reasonable argument. But I do think that the film would lose more if was buttressed with an allegorical context for, uh, more recent world history.