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[Tiruin]

You could say the same things about Western attitudes towards our own history.  Most fiction and nonfiction set prior to, to pick a time period semi-arbitrarily, the French Revolution is entirely from the aristocrats' perspective.  Even if its set in a fictional world based on the real past.

I think that's most because poor people are boring.

That's exactly the mindset of an aristocrat with no idea at all of the lives of others not alongside their strata would say--they'd work merely on stereotypes. Poorly detailed ones other than 'filth' and 'muck' and other synonyms to how little they knew, or at least, their experience or exposure.

In contrast, rich aristocratic people are boring. They all sit around and go "Where's my tea!", what with their wigs and their shiny coins and their whitened teeth, they laze around all day and can't provide for their own food. They throw money at other people for them to grow their food. [/stereotype]

But yeah. Poking the media, there are a lot of examples counter to that kind of thinking...that may or may not be just outside of one's viewpoint due to popularity. Grrr that kind of pop-culture.

[hops]

I meant fictionally speaking. A peasant can't go on adventures, they just grub in the dirt until they die. :v

[Mech#4]

I would assume the aristocracy would have had a higher chance of their writings recognised, respected and archived, as well as the spare time and money to devote to recording day to day life. There's paintings like the "The Potato Gatherers" by Jules Bastien-Lepage, a bit later in 1870s but Realism catches a lot of the average life for people.

[Reelya]

Free speech? On the internet? Yo' crazy, bro.

Well a blockchain based discussion system would basically prevent their being any moderators. At all. Maybe that's the next gen of 4 chan / reddit right there. With the advantage that tipping would be built right into the discussion platform (perhaps upvoting could be a tipping transaction in the currency of the blockchain: users get a quota of upvotes, those become currency, then a share of the upvoted coins goes to the blockchain miners. Presto you have monetization, reputation system and incentivize the blockchain miners). With literally no servers or mods, then the game changes completely.

[Kot]

You could say the same things about Western attitudes towards our own history.  Most fiction and nonfiction set prior to, to pick a time period semi-arbitrarily, the French Revolution is entirely from the aristocrats' perspective.  Even if its set in a fictional world based on the real past.

I could provide quite a lot of Central ( :p ) and Eastern Europe examples from dirty peasant pov, and there is quite a fuckton of reasons for that. Maybe later, when I get on PC.

[Loud Whispers]

You could say the same things about Western attitudes towards our own history.  Most fiction and nonfiction set prior to, to pick a time period semi-arbitrarily, the French Revolution is entirely from the aristocrats' perspective.  Even if its set in a fictional world based on the real past.

Not in England

You even Canterbury tales mate

[hops]

Yeah but isn't that Post-Black Plague? Where so many peasants died that the aristocracy had to give more rights to keep their power.

[TD1]

I think England counts. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a contemporary of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, was very aristocratic in focus. Beowulf was, too. Even Chaucer's inspiration - a bunch of people hiding from the plague and telling stories in the country - was based on the nobility.

Yeah but isn't that Post-Black Plague? Where so many peasants died that the aristocracy had to give more rights to keep their power.

Even post black death, don't imagine that authors gave much more care for the peasantry. The rights you speak of were mainly mobility rights so the peasants could move and work.

[ChairmanPoo]

You could say the same things about Western attitudes towards our own history.  Most fiction and nonfiction set prior to, to pick a time period semi-arbitrarily, the French Revolution is entirely from the aristocrats' perspective.  Even if its set in a fictional world based on the real past.

This is arguably not true. There's plenty of prior literature dealing with middle and lower classes. Picaresque novel as a whole, for instance

[Mech#4]

You could say the same things about Western attitudes towards our own history.  Most fiction and nonfiction set prior to, to pick a time period semi-arbitrarily, the French Revolution is entirely from the aristocrats' perspective.  Even if its set in a fictional world based on the real past.

This is arguably not true. There's plenty of prior literature dealing with middle and lower classes. Picaresque novel as a whole, for instance

I think the thing is, while it is dealing with the lower classes, it was still written by someone in the noble or aristrocratic classes.

[Reelya]

One thing I really dislike about Fantasy Japan, made by Western sources, is that their sources tend to be from the nobility, myths, and legends of Japan at the time with very VERY little actual historical knowledge on how people lived.

You could say the same things about Western attitudes towards our own history.  Most fiction and nonfiction set prior to, to pick a time period semi-arbitrarily, the French Revolution is entirely from the aristocrats' perspective.  Even if its set in a fictional world based on the real past.

People seem to have missed the bolded parts. Neonivek was talking about Western appropriation of Japanese history, and Enigmahat was talking about fiction set in pre-19th century times. The claims there aren't about Japanese or European stories written during these times, but about modern western historical adaptations.

[ChairmanPoo]

I think the thing is, while it is dealing with the lower classes, it was still written by someone in the noble or aristrocratic classes.

*shrug* nominally yes, but it hardly takes away from the social critique elements.

It's also a rather imprecise label. At the time there were quite a lot of people that while being technically nobility, were destitute and qualified as lower middle class, at best.

[Reelya]

Though we're now off the topic that was started, because Neo and Enigma were talking about modern historical fiction, not about fiction written during those time periods. Those are two different arguments/topics completely. One is about how we in the present filter the past, the other is about how the past filtered the past.

So if we look at modern historical fiction about Japan, it's all about lords and samurais. Whereas the fiction from ancient Japan includes Momotaro, and Issun-Boshi: stories of childless poor peasant families who get a magical kid who makes good. And Kintaro: some kid of good birth, but who was brought up in a mud hut on a mountain by a scraggly old woman. In Momotaro the poor couple find a giant mutant peach floating down the river and decide to eat it. Eating some suspect shitty food that you just found at random isn't a pre-occupation of the nobles, but it makes sense if common folk were re-telling the story.

I think western historical fiction is actually similar. Mostly is all about kings and knights. You see very little of normal people's life. e.g. D&D has adventurer classes, and "commoner classes" are basically a joke - a mere afterthought to the heroic level system. Sometimes you get a parody like Monty Python, where the trope name "Dung Ages" is appropriate, but even this is a parody/cliche, seeing non-nobles as filthy insane vermin rather than real people who actually run the country.

[scrdest]

You could say the same things about Western attitudes towards our own history.  Most fiction and nonfiction set prior to, to pick a time period semi-arbitrarily, the French Revolution is entirely from the aristocrats' perspective.  Even if its set in a fictional world based on the real past.

This is arguably not true. There's plenty of prior literature dealing with middle and lower classes. Picaresque novel as a whole, for instance

I think the thing is, while it is dealing with the lower classes, it was still written by someone in the noble or aristrocratic classes.

You know what was the big thing about nobility, priests and maaaybe some burghers?

They were literate.

It's not even necessary that the nobility was the interesting ones from the perspective of themselves. It's that the stories of the lower classes, by lower classes, were passed along by oral tradition, which is more prone to being lost or distorted over time.

When interest in the 'common folk' picked up around the time Romanticism showed up due to Rousseau and friends, that's when you see ethnographists, with means to publish the tales, start writing them down, and random writers writing about contemporary peasant lives.

[ChairmanPoo]

My contention is that there were plenty of stories about the lower classes, with a lower-class viewpoint. The writers might not have been exactly "lowest of the low", but quite often were not all that far from paucity themselves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazarillo_de_Tormes This one in particular is famous because there's a huge amount of social critique in it... to the extent that the author (wisely) opted to stay anonymous.