this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2025
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Do medieval shows only hire conventionally unattractive men? I always thought the convention was to have attractive people play important parts or "good" characters, regardless of gender, but admittedly I don't really watch many medieval shows.
Witcher?
Game did a good job of having the ugliest polish man with a pitchfork in the town...
Then the local alchemist has a dump truck ass with eyeliner on.
If you're talking about my girl Keira Metz, she's a witch, not a standard alchemist. Woman definitely engages in performance enhancing magic
Had to look up. Got alchemist and herbalist confused.
It was tomira. I did remember the ass lol
I looked her name up on google and half the images are indeed about said dump truck lol
I think the canon is that pretty much all witches do
*Attractive evil villain enters scene*
"...they're gonna get a tragic backstory and sacrifice themselves for some noble cause."
*3 seasons later*
"Oh goddamit."
When your entire idea of middle ages comes from people funking around marginalia creatures this is what happens. But the middle ages were an early-capitalistic moment with more dynamism than you're told. Even under feudalism people must have had personal interocurses, private and economical. Imagine the scams of the time.
Yep just look at the guilds. The Hansa (Hanseatic Trade League) owned several cities and harbours in the Baltic and North sea.
In Frankfurt, an inventor developed an early form of steam engine, but was bullied and denied by the boatsmakers guild.
Many interesting stories who are more than just peasants rolling in filth.
And even the city republics would destroy the primitive view of Hollywood on the freedoms of the medieval person. Not to speak of the Dithmarschen peasant republic or the swiss confederation and their wars of independence against the HR Emperor.
The one thing that went down would be international travel, because the Roman infrastructure was left to rot or became dangerous to use. On the other hand naval travel became more important, the gold standard was replaced by silver, with the exception of the Islamic empires of the time that still used the gold coin as the default.
The years following the fall of the Western roman empire up to the year 1000 were arguably the most unstable and maybe this is where a certain imagery comes from. Even than there had to be local markets.
The evolution of language and culture alone is interesting enough on its own. Than, there's the whole deal with castle and fortresses. Castles were not these in the fairytales, early castles were settlements reminiscent of your minecraft builds. A set of enclosures, walled of course, with a central building followed by lesser houses and activities.
The kind of castle you're thinking of used to belong to higher ones like princes or important people, the kind of thing you imagined in the Ivanhoe. The average feudal settlement was the aforementioned set of enclosures, that also served as an administrative layer.
Feudal Lords were absolutely vile in the way they used their right over the people under them. Occasionally even inbred. That is somewhat true. Also the more sophisticated castle were not funny places to be in if you weren't the right person.
By "important or 'good' characters" I wasn't trying to say "protagonists and morally good characters", though there are certainly plenty of authors and directors who follow that rule.