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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hussar" data-source="post: 9367558" data-attributes="member: 22779">It’s funny. I was absolutely pilloried very recently for saying exactly this.To me this is the major problem with fantasy as a genre. Fantasy is a romanticized version of a period of history that was an unending hellscape of horrific event. People had no rights. Violence was the primary source of all conflict resolution from personal conflict all the way to cultural conflicts. Beating your children was perfectly acceptable and even encouraged. As was beating your wife or servants. None of those people had any recourse or protections. Now we have fantasy as a genre trying to square that circle by ignoring all the horrific implications of the period. That’s why the OP talks about paladins. I’d argue that the presence of paladins and the problems they caused at the table was more simply a symptom of people not taking the time to reconcile the fact that our chosen genre likes to ignore a LOT of the historical reality of the time. There’s a reason that while technologically DnD and fantasy is set in that time period, socially it’s far, far closer to modern day culture. Even Tolkien’s Middle Earth is most certainly not medieval.</blockquote>