#some inaccuracies are just honest mistakes that come from encountering bad faith sources in research

[daisyachain]

Another axis for story description should be Homeliness vs Exoticism.

Homeliness: Some depictions of real or real-analogue places are rooted in an understanding of the logic of that place. Geography/climate is described as welcoming or at least non-hostile. Customs are treated as common-sense. Details of everyday life are accurate.

ex. Oofuri shows life in a major Japanese urban area with very little deviation even in the name of story convenience. The logistics of train rides, local landmarks, sunset, and distances factor into the plot.

ex. Infinity Train Book 4 sets its real-world portions in the Canadian music scene during like one of two 5-year periods in history when the Canadian music scene was ever relevant. Its characters’ backgrounds are rooted in two real-world demographics (third- or fourth-generation Japanese-Canadians whose parents grew up in internment camps, first-generation Korean-Canadians whose parents were displaced by the Korean War) and their backgrounds match (Ryan’s family are more assimilated, Min-Gi’s are less).

Exoticism: Some works depict settings with no understanding for why the community depicted came to exist in that way in that place. Worldbuilding doesn’t add up. Rules of culture aren’t explained and have no reasonable basis. Any questions about the setting are shut down or are answered with absurd responses. The setting is bizarre, hostile, impossible to understand, difficult to question. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; just as homeliness enhances realism or emotional connection, exoticism can enhance performance. Depictions of real-world customs are outright false, inaccurate, or twisted.

(loose) ex. 1990s-2000s DC Gotham City depicts a version of New York that gets razed to the ground every 6 months and never gets any new buildings. The people living in it are hardened criminals, child vigilantes, and also murder victims, with nobody apparently working in insurance. The city is full of glowing green chemical vats while also, apparently, being the home of the nation’s ruling class. There’s an evil clown there. The place is not meant to feel real, it’s a caricature of 70s NYC as depicted by conservative news channels. The real forces and pressures that created 70s NYC (waves of immigration from Europe in the early 20thC, hostile WASP power structures, the Cold War turning the federal government’s resources to overseas imperial conquest) don’t really exist except by implication.

ex. Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time has dozens of gimmick fantasy cultures that function by nonsense rules designed to waste the reader’s time and put female characters in situations that only he, personally, finds sexy.

In-Between: Then other depictions have a grab-bag of the two. Some rules about the setting are treated as normal, others are nonsensical or shown to be strange. There are outright mistakes, but there’s an effort at accuracy. Something like that.

ex. North American writers using the UK as a setting while writing with US colloquialisms and demographics.

ex. Pathologic, which scores full points on the Homeliness scale except for the treatment of the Kin characters, who are firmly on the Exoticism end of the spectrum.

Homeliness and Exoticism don’t have to be determined by the creative team’s ID. A lot of US writers treat the US with Exoticism by having 0 clue about the history of their country and writing about its customs without any sort of context or understanding for where they came from. Writers from one region can do enough research with enough good will to treat another region with Homeliness. The above Infinity Train example is a piece of work by a US team set in Canada that feels really homey from a Canadian perspective. Admittedly these are 2 really similar nations, but I’ve seen US writers fuck it up before. Can’t ever expect anything from those mfs.