Molop Labs

Ah, drat.

There's a problem with doing hasty, incomplete research: there are still real people at the other end of it.

The Dorians led me to Golden Dawn (not the Hermetic Order, but the one with seats in the Greek Parliament), back to Metaxas of the apocryphally Laconic "Ohi!"and off with Alexander the Pretty Durned Competent to Macedonian Nationalism...and passing through some rather familiar territory along the way, white marble statues and Ovid as a PUA and all that rot.

I don't want to be insulting political parties or whole people. As tempting as it is to have the Conspiracy of Fire Nuclei show up to toss a few bombs when the action has flagged, how is that different from having random Apache show up to shoot arrows at the heroes in some schlock Western? At least make some effort to get it right and be balanced in how you describe it.

Right. You are going to give offense no matter how careful you are, because there's always someone who wants to accept it. Is this, though; is mischaracterizing a movement or stereotyping a people, in the same class as getting the history or science wrong?

I do believe there exists the idea of a higher standard, and that is for reproducibility. My star example there being CPR; if you are going to show CPR in a work, get it right. Because as unlikely as the chain of events might be, what you wrote might be what someone uses in a real life-or-death situation.

On a lesser scale, I like to get directions and addresses correct because I have personal experience and the recounted experience of friends of navigating by what they read in a work of fiction. Now, I'm not saying you'd better make sure the A Train is the quickest way to get to Harlem, but it doesn't take that long to get the right road...or put in clues that the building in question is thoroughly fictional.

It sort of goes with the territory that in a cheap adventure people (individuals, organizations, crowds, entire cultures) are going to be variously incompetent and emotional. Entire villages will spontaneously grab pitchforks and torches to follow the hero after a monster, and two-dollar hoods will empty their guns at Superman (before throwing them, of course).

Perhaps the trick is to be even-handed in one's insults; that everyone comes off badly. Just make sure, if you want to be really fair about it, you include the hero...