I don't mind fiction, or loose play with the facts. What annoys me is the pretense of historical accuracy - the intentional misleading of the audience, making them believe what they see is accurate. Some examples of this phenomenon include (but are not limited to) Vikings, The Tudors, The Borgias, Kingdom of Heaven, and even Game of Thrones. The first three are pretty self-evident; the last two are probably not. Kingdom of Heaven uses its historical guise to bash institutionalized religion and blame it for essentially all violence everywhere. In Game of Thrones or ASOIAF, GRRM has attempted to increase the legitimacy of his work by pointing out how it was "inspired by real historical events* - Tolkien uncut (literally; the man needs an editor badly).

Really, just look at the type of questions we get in the sub about such shows. "How accurate is show X" should not even be a question. Of course it's not accurate! It's television designed for entertainment.

I don't think so, personally. I don't enjoy a very accurate historical portrayal any more or less than an emotionally powerful one. For me, it's simply a movie: a dramatization of a real or imagined event. If it's done well, that's great. If it has material accuracy, maybe it scores a few bonus points in my book because it provides me with a knowledge benefit to some small degree as well. But I don't place a lot of stock in movies being "accurate", because they're media. Heck, I don't really look to documentaries too much for that reason. I feel everything should be taken with a constant grain of salt, because even journals need sales. Movies should be taken with a larger grain of salt, even if extensive research was done to make them historically accurate, but I'm not going to hate a movie or love it because it was historically accurate. It just has to appeal to me personally in an entertainment sense.

On that note, I can understand a sort of "fetishizing" of movies as well. Historians study history, after all, and seek accuracy when they write about history themselves. In that sense, it's probably fantastic for many historians to see that history on the big screen done right, and dismaying when it's done wrong. But that's no different than, for example, a stock broker hating a movie that makes them out to be slimeballs, or a basketball player hating a movie that makes them out to be egomaniacs. In each case, it's simply a portrayal of something close to one's values that doesn't quite line up with what they see as right. So I think if it does happen, it's perfectly understandable in that sense as well.

Definitely an interesting topic, I'll have to pay closer attention to it when I watch movies from now on :).

I think that they do to an extent. I really enjoyed Lincoln, despite some obvious problems with the timeline, certain character portrayals, and added scenes that wouldn't and couldn't have happened in real life. The movie is still incredibly well written, and does a great job at portraying both Lincoln the man and Lincoln the calculating politician, which I think is an angle on the man that more people need to be aware of. I'm also willing to forgive a lot in a movie that breaks down the legal/Constitutional issues with the Emancipation Proclamation as elegantly as it does.

On the other side of that coin, movies like The Last Samurai and The Patriot deserve to have their historical flaws held up in a harsh light, because I don't feel that there is any kind of good faith effort to preserve historical authenticity in the face of entertainment. Those strike me as movies trying to have it both ways; they want to use their historical setting to try and address Serious Issues, but they are perfectly willing to distort the narrative to suit whatever emotional notes that they try to hit. The infamous church burning scene in The Patriot is a perfect example; it's something that didn't even remotely come close to happening, but is in there to demonize British troops and to set up the central conflict of the movie.

Basically for me it comes down to an honest effort on the part of the filmmakers to try and take their setting seriously enough not to ignore history for the sake of the story that they're trying to tell. If you're going to invent something for the sake of your story, it had better at least be feasible and make sense historically. On the other hand, if you're clearly just goofing around, like in National Treasure, then screw it. Put hidden messages on the Constitution, stuff emeralds up Jefferson's nose on Mount Rushmore, whatever.

I think you may have a point about "material accuracy," as far as that goes, but for the most part, I think historians are typically not so much concerned with whether that's the right model of refrigerator or if those quillons are the right length as with whether the story is fairly depicted. Are the characters' motivations and loyalties oversimplified? Is some complicated series of events hand-waved as incompetence or bad luck? Are entire portions of the story cut out? Have the filmmakers conflated history and myth?

To some extent, the validity of those concerns can be debated as well, but I think we have grounds for insisting on narrative accuracy to a far greater degree than material accuracy.

I think there are two basic schools in the historian category and then there's one additional category.

As it pertains to historians I find typically speaking that I run into those that appreciate that awareness is brought to their topic, because laymen would not likely have stumbled onto it without the help of media so they are perfectly content to overlook historical indiscretions, then I find those that are very puritanical. Reddit itself has quite a few of them and I admit that there is at least one film that I fall into that category on, where any enjoyment of the film is marred by the fact that something wasn't gotten right. Now admittedly this has a gradient to it, where on one side you have people that cannot abide by the fact that a slipper was wrong or the incorrect era sword was used, to those that become incensed that relatively small, historically obtuse ideas weren't included.

Let me give you a couple of examples here before I move onto the third category.

I consider myself on one end of that gradient. I cannot enjoy Gladiator because the premise is just so laughably bad. The entire scene in the forest where Commodus simply assumes that he's going to be given the Empire as allegedly "wise" politicians publically draw battle lines against him, then assuming that he would overtake an extremely popular general just does not work for me. I can't enjoy the rest of the film because that detail was so poorly handled.

Then there are situations like Barry Lyndon, which I use as kind of an inverse here. In an attempt to remain consistent with the styles of the time period, there is a fair amount of heterosexual male to male mouth kissing as a sign of kinship. If this had been omitted to keep modern audiences from getting queezy there's an entire class of historian that can't deal with changing history to update it for modern audiences.

The third category is the uptight layman with something to prove. They can't enjoy Braveheart because it's a fanciful modern day poem with absolutely no regard given for history, though I would argue that the hyper majority of Americans would never know who Robert the Bruce was if he were not in the film. Does it butcher history? Sure, absolutely it does, but it doesn't even pretend to be historical. Pagan king? Kilts? Isabella of France? But the layman has something to prove to his peers so he gets uptight and angry. He has a surface level understanding of the subject matter, but he gets his rocks off by telling everyone how wrong the movie is.

I have no time for anyone who moans about 'accuracy' in fiction. I expect the original Shakespeare of Julius Caesar was 'wildly historically inaccurate' also, that doesn't stop it from being a good play.

I think every individual is going to judge the quality of a work of fiction by parameters which are important to them. A visual artist might judge a film by its cinematography, a musician by its sound design. Historians are naturally going to place disproportionate importance on historical accuracy in a work. They, like everyone else are entitled to comment on it - you can't stop them, and neither should you wish to. Likewise, the creator of the work is just as entitled to turn around to them and say "This is a work of fiction and historical accuracy is not as important to us."

Of course, there have been cases where the creator's choices when it comes to deviating from historical accuracy have definitely been uncool: U-571 and the church-burning scene in The Patriot spring to mind.

Not fetishize perhaps, but I find that when I see something historically inaccurate in a movie, my brain halts all mental activity as if unable to comprehend what it just witnessed, and I find myself fighting the urge to launch into a rant about all the mistakes.

For me, it's a problem of suspension of belief, knowing that something is incorrect makes it difficult for me to buy into it as a story.

For every time some history buff has gone out of the way to mention that 300 was not entirely accurate, I would say hell yes.

Really? you mean they did not fight oiled up and shirtless and pantsless without any armor? You don't say??? They did not have gunpowder style bombs or big giant mutant axe hand men? Incredible! Clearly only a scholar of the highest caliber could realize the movie was not entirely accurate. But they were artistic choices, for example the shirtless and pantsless Spartans were inspired by Greek sculptures of the period, which usually were nude. They made the movie better.

"Accuracy" when it comes to sticking a bunch of people in front of a camera in costumes is a laughable concept; the very presence of that camera, the form in which this text is going to be created and distributed and received by a modern audience, belies the notion of accuracy. You can never, ever, recreate the past, you can only build texts that reference texts which come from our purported past.

And that's okay; whether a work of historical fiction is intended as entertainment, as a way of looking at our present, or to promote understanding of the past (Or all three), "accuracy" is absolutely the wrong lens through which to judge it.