Okay, I’m officially procrastinating at this point... but I want to say something about ”historical accuracy” versus “historical fantasy” as a concept.

Just about everything that counts as semi-modern historical romance falls into “historical fantasy“ as a category.

I’m not just talking about the hygiene.

Let’s talk Georgette Heyer, who wrote book after book about how rich people are smart and moral, with anti-Semitic portrayals and casual racism.

This is a fantasy, not reality.

The idea that everybody poor was terrible is a deeply classist fantasy. The morals she promulgated were more reflective of the early 1900s than the early 1800s.

But she did research! So people think she’s historically accurate!

All white historical romances centering on the upper class, while completely erasing the costs imposed by their consumption on the poor and those who had been colonized?

Total fantasy.

People in the Regency had HUGE arguments about the morality of (for instance) sugar given its creation in the slave trade, a thing I have *very* rarely seen reflected in romance novels. Even with otherwise supposedly liberal-seeming characters.

(Am I guilty of this? Yes, I am.)

If you asked authors who wrote these things why they didn’t include them, I bet you several of them would *explicitly* say things like, “oh, it would puncture the fantasy.”

Even those who research heavily and care about accuracy IN GENERAL and would never put the wrong wine glass on the table understand that they are, to some degree, writing a fantasy—not because the elements are fantastical, but in the sense that there is wish-fullfilment.

And so the thing to understand when someone dismisses a book as “not historically accurate” and ”a fantasy” because of the existence of people of color is that they’re not complaining about which wine glasses are on the table.

It’s historically inaccurate, for instance, to have your characters catch a steamer before steamships exist.

It’s not historically inaccurate for like... Black and brown characters to exist.

When people refer to the existence and happiness of these characters as a “fantasy,” what they generally mean is “this sounds like fulfillment of someone else’s wishes.”

Often, they mean: “Back then, Those People didn’t get their wishes fulfilled.”

And sometimes additionally: “And I read those books specifically because I don’t want to see Those People.”

We all know the truth. Governesses and serving girls in the Regency era generally did not marry dukes. (Yes, it’s happened. No, it’s not common). But we love this trope because it fulfills our wishes. Because it’s a fantasy.

I’ve explicitly said that the Brothers Sinister is a feminist fantasy, and I don’t mean that in the sense of “this could never have happened,” but in the sense of, “women are going to do amazing things and win and never have to compromise who they are to find love.”

*All* of historical romance is historical fantasy.

The only question is whose fantasies it caters to.

Saying that only *your* form of wish-fulfillment is accurate is deeply inaccurate.

But if what you want is for non-white people to disappear from historical romance, and if you think the wishes of non-white people to be seen as represented and loved are “inaccurate,” your wish-fulfillment fantasy is white supremacy.

And the only antidote I know of is to have more historical romances with people of color... and more, and more... AND MORE. Until you know that you’re never getting that all-white fantasy back. Not. Ever. Again.