lately and noticing some things. Like the comment strings for A Fly In the Milk May Mean A Baby in the Grave and Not Ever To Dance Again. Some of "Gak! What ghastly scare tactics! A thermos or a properly sterilized bandage isn't that serious. Followed by gentle explanations that, hell yes, they'd discovered sterilization but not antibiotics. Paranoid precautions against infection weren't paranoid.
Healing magic must be really good in most fantasy worlds. Infection is seldom ever brought up.
But it's not the only thing. There are audiences that are seriously surprised by and actively don't want world-building that infringes on their pieties. I still remember the critique that asked what sort of society lets its young men run around wild, and carefully chaperons its young women? (To which my knee-jerk response was, of course, a normal one -- I had read a lot of history by then.) And I once read an article on name where the author seriously wrote that she preferred Erik Thorvaldsson to Erik the Red because it sounded more like a surname. She admitted that she knew having only one name was normally in that northern Europe culture. . . and I was sitting there whimpering, Don't you know that our surnames are in fact the abnormal set up? That exclusively using your family name as a byname is in fact rather unusual.
Very sad, how people who could most use having their minds opened to the possibilities are those most resistant to the works that could teach them. . . .
