Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="cmdr23" data-source="post: 9793877" data-attributes="member: 7046896">While the trope as imagined in fiction may be some reflection of reality somewhere down the line, we are discussing the origin of OP's trope as stated:<h3>"You meet a mysterious stranger in a tavern."</h3>Whether pubs existed and they had a historical social function different from what we might expect now (though I broadly agree) is neither here nor there. We "do" this trope in RPGs broadly because of an intermedial understanding of signs and symbols dating back to lord of the rings and a milieu of western/cowboy media tropes. Those are the cultural referents driving this common narrative move in the hobby - their longer historical context (which may or may not be either accurate or relevant) is not a big factor in this case - because most people have no idea what it is/whether it exists/whether it is "true" etc.I get that you may want to interpret "origin" as "the original time this happened long ago which has lasted millennia" but human memory (broadly speaking) doesn't work in this way - we are affected by recent and prominent historical imaginings rather than driven by accurate historical events and moments, which for the most part we do not understand at all because of a lack of evidence, living memory, etc. Of course if you're a historian working on the pre-modern this doesn't apply, but those people are not representative of the broader human understanding and processing of historically-related tropes.</blockquote>

Verification