It's been ages since I did a clickbait, hot-take, rant.
Lately, I've been listening to even more APs than usual. Most are wonderful, entertaining and inspiring but it turns out I am a picky listener and certain things I hear just ejector-seat me right out of the fiction whenever I come across them. I've already talked about tieflings and pun names and edgelords. That's not what I'm going to complain about today. Today I want to talk about 3 Anachronisms that somehow manage to become the pimple-on-the-face of whatever I'm listening to. In order from bad to worst, they are:
1: GLASS WINDOWS:
A quasi-fantasy world should not have glass windows for the same reason they shouldn't have mechanical pencils... these things just weren't around in the actual middle ages (upon which most fantasy I listen to is based). Yes there was leaded glass - windows of this material existed, but were small and rare. The other exception is the stained glass window. Those certainly existed but were so expensive as to only really be found in churches. Because this technology sort of existed in the medieval world, I'll designate this offensive anachronism as "least bad".
2: "OK"
Characters should not say "OK". I was writing script the other day, and I wanted to write that an NPC had "lost what was left of their cool" but I stopped and went back and changed it to "lost what was left of their composure". The idiom of "losing one's cool" was just too modern. It would've sounded weird. To be honest, if you scratch the surface, there are a lot of words and phrases that should be avoided because they were coined in modernity, but at some point we have to just accept the inconsistencies and even hypocrisies of fantasy. Still, "OK" ... is not OK.
3: THE RAPIER
I don't know why this one bugs me the most. It is anachronistic - rapiers did not appear historically until the late fifteenth century. But you know, it's not the anachronism that bothers me... I think it's a correlation I feel exists between "characters with rapiers" and "players with 'Main Character Syndrome'" ... is it just me? Maybe. But the character with a rapier is very likely, I feel, to be either an edgelord or a joke character who speaks with loud blustering bravado and possible wears a floppy crushed velvet cap.
"OK". Rant over. And it feels good to get it out.
So, what bugs you? What are some things that you can't stand in APs?
