if you are going to do historical inaccuracy, then go big. Just take it to a whole ‘nother level.
I mean like Knight’s Tale “chanting Queen at the jousting tournament ‘foxy lady’” levels of anachronism. Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters with Hansel injecting himself with insulin and Gretel wielding a multiple-shot crossbow levels of anachronism. Go for Blazing Saddles, Blackadder, Jack of All Trades, Connecticut Yankee levels of anachronism
you either have to play by the rules or throw out the book.
Go full on Xena. All of history happened at the same time. Get your legs broken by Caesar and find out Lao Tzu didn’t write that book, his wife did, and she hitting on you…all 10 years before you go meet up with Helen at Troy. Fight with Beowulf and commission Sappho within a few months of each other. Abraham and Issac? Only like 2 years before Jesus. Invent CPR and the kite during the bronze age. Watch your gal pal teach Homer how to be a better bard. Have a fucking battle of the bands in Ancient Greece. TIME IS MEANINGLESS.
Go Full On Xena
Life motto: go full on Xena
I invented this theory for Hansel and Gretel but I find it holds true pretty much across the board, at least for fantasy – everything in a historically inaccurate film or TV series stops being ludicrous and starts making perfect sense if you posit that the story is actually set in a distant future, after a massive nuclear apocalypse from which humanity and the planet are only just recovering.
Gatling guns that fire arrows in a setting where most houses still have thatch? Sure why not, if someone remembered how a gatling gun worked but didn’t have the materials to make bullets. Faces of missing children on bottles of milk going to market? Someone once found a milk carton preserved from before the fall and thought, what a good idea. Actual facts magic? Nuclear mutations. A jousting tournament based on the X-Games structure? A sk8r survived the bombs and couldn’t rebuild a half-pipe but could rebuild the games with horses and wooden weapons.
Zippers on Morgaine’s dresses in Merlin makes perfect sense if Merlin is taking place in the distant future where a nuclear bomb caused mutations that resulted in Kilgarrah the talking dragon and Merlin’s mutant ability to commit telekinesis, but someone remembered how to make zippers and because they’re fiddly to make they only appear on the most expensive clothing.
You don’t even ever have to mention the apocalypse (though they do in movies like Priest with Paul Bettany, where it’s mostly a visual reference, showing ruined skyscrapers in the wasteland). You just assume, and go from there.
Mooncustafer 