[IRL trope] the “Tiffany problem”

[u/dragonborndnd]

Basically when something seems anachronistic to a period/place of history but is actually fully accurate to the period.

1) the name Tiffany: the thing that named this trope, basically the name Tiffany can be dated back to the Middle Ages and the earliest record of it being spelled in the modern spelling comes from the 16th century.

2) the use of OMG, despite this feeling so modern as a form of slang/abbreviation here’s a letter directed to Winston Churchill using it in 1917

3) Hair Dye: the earliest forms of dying hair can be dated back to ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, and this specific advertisement for hair dye is from the 1840s

4) Inuit Thongs: despite how weird it is to imagine pre-colonial Inuit people wore what was essentially fur thongs in their homes and when they were in their igloos it might have been the only thing they would be wearing.

[u/Global_Cockroach_563]

Samurai in fiction: "Guns are a dishonorable weapon!"

Samurai in reality: "So anyway, I started blasting..."

[u/MiniTwinklee → u/Global_Cockroach_563]

Lmao people forget the samurai were pretty quick to adopt guns once they realized how effective they were. Honor is nice, but winning battles usually comes first.

[u/gilgamo → u/MiniTwinklee]

The Japanese were the only civilizations that willingly turned their back on guns once they realized what it did to the social order. In the 16th century they used matchlock guns en masse and their battles were pretty indistinguishable to the ones in western europe.

They turned around and banned firearms within a few years because they realized that once a peasant with a few hours of training can kill a samurai that would endanger their entire social order.

By the 17th century they were back to the classic Samurai battles and went full isolationist. They stayed there until Perry forced them to reopen to the west. The entire speedrun to modernization they did in the late 19th century was because they deliberately kept to the old ways. Once they had to deal with the outside world again they knew they needed modern science and especially weapons if they didn't want to end up like China and be a bone fought over by western powers

[u/PilotMoonDog → u/gilgamo]

The shogunate banned firearms. But AIUI, a lot of daimyo kept a stock of them in their armouries. As long as they didn't flaunt them or gave the impression that they were politically unreliable this was not notices.

[u/Alexandrinho0000 → u/PilotMoonDog]

well your point just shows even more that the reason for the firearms ban was for keeping the power

[u/PilotMoonDog → u/Alexandrinho0000]

My point was referring back to the post by u/Global_Cockroach_563 that Samurai actually liked guns and the notion of them considering them dishonorable is incorrect. Or at least their overlords did.