I love pre-modern history, but I’ll rarely watch a movie or TV show about anything related to pre-modern history.

Sounds strange? Let me explain why.

Have you seen the Barbarians TV show on Netflix? If not, don’t let the super cool helmet design for Arminius in the adverts fool you. Most of the armor in the rest of the show is the floppy leather crap you’d expect. My friends really enjoyed it though. Personally, I can’t watch it, nor can I watch 99% of other historical shows for the same reason I’ll never watch Nolan’s Odyssey.

The bleak and misconception-riddled aesthetics of modern cinema, especially Hollywood and Netflix, has no place tainting my beautiful subconscious brain that I spent a long time reading history to develop. I feel sorry for people who watch historical TV shows and movies without having a foundation of what things might’ve really looked like first, because their internal view of history is probably now extremely warped.

I don’t care if they say, “It’s just fiction, I’m not here to watch a documentary!” Bruh, you’re still tainting your mind instead of developing your own imagery using imagination, which only comes from reading and studying primary sources. Whether you admit it or not, when you have no visual foundation for the past and watch something about it, you’ll subconsciously dig up those images instead of having a cleaner, more grounded understanding every time you think of it. This is why an honest professor will admit that going to university for history deals a lot with “unlearning” as well as learning. Everyone who reads Harry Potter after watching the show first will have a totally different experience than someone who reads the books first and watches the show after.

Protect your brain and read books and view classical art instead of watching modern, depressing slop that corrupts your understanding of the past! It goes much better with tea that way too.