For me the easiest tell is the up front, unprompted, and unsolicited declaration of nonpoliticalness. When someone takes the time and expends the breath to announce how nonpolitical they are, what follows is almost always a rant about how everything/everyone else is too political these days, and that of course leads into something between status quo advocacy and outright reactionary/regressive sentiments for some fabled time before those wicked politics were visible to the nonpolitical ranter.
People that are hostile to service workers. Some just want to take some ideological stand against tipping when the service worker doesn’t really have a choice and needs those tips to survive in the current unjust system in a way where ideological purity gestures toward that service worker just look like being a greedy and sanctimonious asshole. The worst of such people will actually declare, shamelessly, that they believe that service workers don’t deserve a living wage. The implications of that are worthy.
I may get shit for this, but I’ll say it anyway: this hair and beard combo, seen on living people. I have yet to meet anyone in person with that look that wasn’t a chud.
(If one of you is a comrade with that look, I am sorry in advance for the prejudice and if I ever meet you in person I will atone by buying you a drink or something.)
…But chances are that most people who spend any significant amount of time thinking about the Roman Empire are not thinking about concrete, nor gender variant history, city planning, bathhouses and latrines, how the misspellings of vulgar graffiti are used to reconstruct the history of the Romance languages, how Catullus 16 was basically the spiritual predecessor to “Ram Ranch”, or all sorts of other genuinely interesting things about the wonders and woes of daily life thousands of years ago… But rather, most people will be thinking about sexy muscle men with spears and shields and racist fashy undertones.
Ancient people deserve better than that.
A lot of popular historical period and period-inspired (various fantasy settings or whatever) fiction tend to revolve around wars and stuff. I think we need more works like Pentiment that tries to connect modern people to the human side of history. Humans in the past were still little weird people like we are today, they just had very different material conditions.
