I just picked up a book from the library called Sinners about a woman in 16th century Rome that hates her dad and wants to kill him.
But she’s a daughter in a rich family so she might as well be a Disney princess. There is also all the other tropes like this guy she can’t help being attracted to even though she doesn’t want to.
My biggest issue reading this book is I’m just like, “you’re rich, what’s your fucking problem. Boo hoo you hate your dad. You made it to adulthood in the 16th century in a comfortable existence.”
These stories are never about the peasants or people who work for these rich assholes. It’s always some wealthy woman that likes reading as if to be a stand in for the reader. It really goes to shoe what a bourgeois medium the novel is
Is all historical fiction like this or have I just picked up a generic example?
Writers who write about feudal times but want their characters to have agency in a regimented society just make them come from a merchant or aristocrat family, so at the very least the genre ends up inadvertently reifying the primacy of the rich experience
Rly the big issue is few people who write fiction have rly studied history in depth. Peasants had tons of agency! Even serfs had as much or more agency than your average joe today, considering that (until stone castles became common) they had a considerably better shot at burning their exploiters houses down, and generally did that if he pissed them off too much.
But understanding medieval society is hard, so its easier to reskin modernity with some faux medieval aesthetics, and write a merchant or noble character who has more in common with the author, who usually lives in the global north, i.e. in global economic terms the aristocracy and urbanites (bourgeois)
Most media in a market society tends towards slop. The aim of media production under capitalist production is profit, and entertainment, themes, etc only matter to the money-people insofar as they see a potential effect on profit margins.
Those with the most money to consume media are the better paid workers and middle classes. The values and ideas promoted in the media will therefore gravitate around those themes and morals which get the most sales, and those media which condemn or criticise capitalist values (making the viewer feel uncomfortable with, e.g., individualist consumerism) drive these wealthier viewers away and domt make them buy as much shit.
Under capitalist production there is a tendency also to increase the constant portion of capital (e.g. copyright, licensing CGI programmes, buying computers to render stuff) at the expense of variable capital (e.g. writer, costume designers, researchers.)
As everyone invests in these constant capitals to make their media-product as big a spectacle as possible, to drive up sales, any increased profit (relative surplus value) from, e.g. good CGI letting you fire workers, disappears and consequently capital has to find a new spectacle to mine relative surplus value from, or fire some workers and work the rest harder to keep up the rate of profit.
you might like pillars of the earth by ken follett, which is about the building of a cathedral, and some of the main characters are peasant laborers.
Whole series is pretty cool, covers how that place develops across the middle ages.
Not all…
Isn’t that moreso Alternate History fiction?
Oh yeah, woops. Misread the post title.😅
What a fucking hook. I’ll need to check this out
I enjoyed it immensely. 
The Sharpe series definitely counts as slop (the amount of jerking off British redcoats is ridiculous) but the main character does start in the gutters and struggles to climb the military ranks, and most of his antagonists (barring the French) are upper crust British officers, but his greatest aspiration is to join the oppressors class.
His best friend/companion is an irishman (named Patrick of course) that joined the British army due to English colonial policies starving his family, but beyond snide remarks about English protestants he’s fine being a part of the imperial machine that oppresses his own land and people
It sucks more after class consciousness. But sometimes it’s still fun to read because you can become immersed in the setting even if you want to guillotine the characters. And there are a few about “people who work for these rich assholes,” or work against them. Off the top of my head -
Mary Renault’s The Persian Boy, about Bagoas, a eunuch beloved by Alexander the Great.
Captivity, by Gyorgy Spiros, a 1000-page bummer of a novel about a Jewish Roman around the time of Vespasian, where everything that can go wrong does go wrong, and by the end of the book it’s about to get worse.
My Name is Red, by Orhan Pamuk, set in a workshop of miniaturists in the Ottoman Empire. Also The White Castle, in which the narrator is a Venetian captured by the Ottomans.
Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s The Buru Quartet, in which the narrator is definitely privileged, the descendant of Javanese royalty, but he’s still oppressed by the Dutch, and soon he rejects the old hierarchies and becomes involved in the anti-colonial struggle.
The Water Margin, one of the original historical novels, where a bunch of outlaws during the Song Dynasty engage in Robin Hoodish activity.
Sturgeon’s law states, “Ninety percent of everything is crap”. The adage was coined by American science fiction author and critic Theodore Sturgeon while defending the merits of the genre. Sturgeon observed that most works in any field were low quality. Therefore, science fiction was not uniquely inferior.
Now for that upper 10%, the Crème de la Crème? Red Plenty. It even cites it’s sources. It’s all about the Cybernetics program within the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 60s.
You don’t have to like the character to still enjoy it, for instance you could analyse it through materialism
These characters are unenjoyable because they commit the ultimate cinema sin of being boring. I recently readd the two Chili Palmer books by Elmore Leonard and they’re full of terrible people, at least they’re interesting to read about.
Peasants did not often live interesting lives unfortunately
Wrong imo
Your view based on and derived from (popular knowledge of the peasant is derived from works written by the bourgeois and aristocrats, not by peasants themselves) the same sorta classist views that lead many of the rich people writing todays shows to think “who cares about the workers, they dont live interesting lives”
Just some of the stories you could tell about peasants:
Coming of age sports story about sportball competitions with the local villages going back generations
Comedy story about the feud thats been splitting the village for generations
Action-drama story about a peasant rebellion
Queer stories, whether focussing on the persecution or relative lack of persecution of queer peasants. Gonna emphasise here that Brokeback Mountain could literally be about two small peasants doing herding work for the bigger peasants before/after their harvest
Antiwar story about being forced to serve in the lords army
Horror thriller story about the spread of the black death
And they lived in a fantastical world, for better or worse, where they did not know about “germs”, “gravity”, “microorganisms”, “gut microbiomes”. There is so much room for stories told from peasants perspectives in a xenofiction type way, talking about well understood phenomena in in a fantastic way rendering them alien to us
Peasants, like all humans throughout all of time have had interesting lives. They have all had rich oral traditions with libraries of mythology and legends and folklore about recent events—this well of creativity is the foundation all urban market societies have been copying and slopifying and putting their names on for millennia.
Also, obligatory note that there are still peasants around today, in the global south mostly, who live (tragically and horrifically in all too many cases) interesting lives—and often have much more interesting stories to tell than the jackasses from middle management or the assholes trading stocks, just as their ancestors have always had more interesting stories than their rulers
The Name of the Rose gang rise up!
Michael Kohlhass is also a great (and short) book about a horse merchant trying to get redress against robber barons in the HRE.
But yeah, there’s a sea of slop for anything interesting out there.
