On top of everything else - historical fiction already assumes something that didn't happen, happened. It doesn't matter how "rare" travel between two places was or wasn't at a given time or place; travel is not a fantastic element.
If you write a story set in the past about a woman who didn't exist who went to a party that didn't exist and met a duke who didn't exist... that doesn't make it fantasy. That's just fiction. If it's historical, it's historical fiction.
I do not point this out because it's the main thing wrong with what she said. I don't credit her with any accuracy in her supposition about what's plausible or implausible.
But when someone wants to be racist without feeling racist? They make up objections that don't apply.
But when someone wants to be racist without feeling racist? They make up objections that don't apply.
A magic portal magically sweeps someone from the western side of the Atlantic Ocean to Europe? That is fantasy.
Someone travels? That's fiction.
Genre divisions can be tricky and nuanced, but this is clear cut.
Someone travels? That's fiction.
Genre divisions can be tricky and nuanced, but this is clear cut.
We're not imagining some miraculous and impossible technological discovery allowed an ocean crossing. We're just imagining that people in the 19TH CENTURY... the age of the industrial revolution, of steam ships and transatlantic cables, went from one place to another.
What this is, is she didn't like something and she also didn't like what that said about her. So she looked for an objection.
I recognize this pattern as a queer person because it happens to us. Gay person with desk photo of spouse?
"Bringing your sexuality to the workplace."
I recognize this pattern as a queer person because it happens to us. Gay person with desk photo of spouse?
"Bringing your sexuality to the workplace."
Twenty desks in the department with pictures of partners, people with wedding rings on fingers, people whose partners stop in to chat, but the one gay person in the department gives someone an icky feeling and they have to find a cause to displace their bigotry onto.
Every single work of historical fiction consists mostly of things that didn't happen AT ALL (and/or things that happened but probably not like that), often ... because the story wants to be interesting ... with at least one highly improbable event at the core.
I mean, this is romance, right? I don't know the work at the center of this but imagine critiquing romance on the fact that the exact specific sequence of events the story depicts all happening as described is improbable.
"I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems really unlikely to me that she would have forgotten her portfolio on the day of her most important presentation and had to go back and missed the train and then because of this JUST HAPPENED TO run into her eventual soulmate?"
Zeroing in one thing out of an entire narrative that strikes *you* as improbable in order to find a reason to object to something you find objectionable is the kind of absurdity that trying to excuse racism drives people to.
And I'm not singling out romance or even fiction as being uniquely based on improbable events. Flip a coin 10 times. Whatever pattern you got? Was exactly as unlikely as getting heads 10 times in a row. Everything is improbable; it's simply that most things don't happen at all.
Oof... if you want to get right down to it? It's not that she didn't think boats existed or that travel was possible. She didn't think it was possible *for South Americans*. She surely could imagine travel from Europe to the Americas, or from US to Europe.
That's the kind of kneejerk racism where you've never thought about other people's lives or stories. I guarantee she wouldn't have balked at a story about a 19th century European heiress with modern sensibilities finding herself in the wilds of wherever she thinks is wild.
The idea that people in those other places exist and that they have sensibilities and that their sensibilities are modern, that they could travel somewhere as the subject and agent of their own story rather than the object of someone else's is news to her.
And it is not happy news, it is disquieting news. She is disquieted. So she rejects the idea, with snark and pointed questioning.
It's seriously just racism. Racism that doesn't want to acknowledge itself, racism disguised by an objection that she herself would realize is ridiculous on its face if it had been raised in any other context.
