On Faking the Homework

 I did not have a good week this week? I had a rough Monday, and then I woke up not feeling spectacular on Thursday, and even worse on Friday. I had plans, but I expect that I’m going to spend today inside not doing much of anything except catching up on lost sleep.

Also this week’s The Flash is a bit of a downer.

As a result, it’s entirely possible this Note doesn’t get finished until actual Saturday morning, if not later.

—

On Faking the Homework

So recently I read Assassin’s Creed: Sword of the White Horse, which is about a Celtic warrior during the time of Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla (so late 9th century Britain). She’s pagan, because the makers of Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla decided that a large percentage of the non-Saxon people of the British Isles were still pagan at this point (spoiler alert: no). It’s creative license though, so we’ll allow it.

No, what really grinds my gears is the way that paganism is depicted. Niamh is a member of the Ladies of the Mist, who answer to the Lady of Avalon in Glastonbury. They’re a secretive matriarchal religion with influence across Britain. They have ties to the court of King Arthur and his court, and were connected to Mordred before he betrayed them to pursue their own agenda. Excalibur is one of their holy artifacts. And of course, they have tensions with the wider Christian population.

What’s wrong with this? Well, for starters, this is almost entirely derived from Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon.

I know some people think that representations of mythology and religion in fiction should be as accurate as possible for the story to work. I’m not one of those people. Historical fiction like Assassin’s Creed is historical fiction, which is a bit different than something like urban or historical fantasy, but I’m okay if they take some liberties. But this isn’t quite that. It’s taking something from another piece of fiction, something which bears little resemblance to the actual material that’s supposed to be represented, and pretending it’s authentic research.

Mists of Avalon is not an accurate depiction of pre-Christian Welsh mythology. I don’t really care what your opinion of the novel is, or of the author–the novel was influential for an awful lot of people, and the revelation that the author was an actual garbage person was a big deal to plenty. This isn’t about that. It’s about how an author looked at that work of fiction and decided to use it as the basis for the depiction of a culture in a novel.

[Also not helpful is that Niamh is meant to be Caledonian (Scottish) and all of her references to Celtic deities/mythological figures are Irish, Welsh, and Gaulish.]

I hate it when people do this. Kevin Hearne does this, on a much smaller scale, with one of the side factions. In Iron Druid Chronicles, there’s a coven of witches that worship the Zoryas, Slavic star goddesses. Except the description the witches give of the Zoryas isn’t from actual Slavic mythology, it’s from Neil Gaiman’s novel American Gods–and Kevin Hearne admits in-series that he’s a fan of Neil Gaiman. Except that Gaiman’s admitted he fudged some of the stuff with Slavic mythology in his book, because he couldn’t find that much information. So the notion of the Zoryas as a trio of goddesses analogous to the Fates and Norns isn’t from mythology, and there are only two of them in the myths. Gaiman made up the third for the story. Doesn’t change that Hearne kept that third one in because he didn’t bother to do any of this own homework.

And then there’s that old Norse prayer that gets on my nerves every time I hear it, which everyone and their mother thinks is a thing but is really just the prayer from the movie _The Thirteen Warrior._ A derivation of it even appears in the beginning of the 2018 _God of War_ game. That one is, at least, derived from the one in the book which is derived from something in the actual historical record, but the original prayer is not what’s being used.

I don’t necessarily ask that fiction requires in-depth research about mythology or any topic really. But I would very much like it if that “research” wasn’t copied and pasted from someone who made it up. And making it up is fine, or making reference to other pieces of fiction is fine, if you admit that’s what you’re doing! When a work tries to pass itself as historical fiction that has done some measure of research, but uses worldbuilding from another piece of fiction–that’s just annoying. Especially with something like Mists of Avalon, which would take five minutes to tell that it’s not genuine Celtic religion. In the Internet Age, you have no excuse for pulling this kind of nonsense.

—