And in some cases, it no longer resembles the world we know at all. This goes all the way down to the language we use, and the pop culture references that can be made in our stories without snapping the reader out of the narrative.
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| And things can get conspiracy-board complicated with this. |
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When You Alter History, Everything Changes
We're all familiar with the idea of the Butterfly Effect. Often used as a science fiction premise, it's when someone goes back in time, changes one thing, and then they come back to their present only to find that seemingly tiny action has resulted in massive, unanticipated changes in the present.
This is something you have to do when you remove the secret world trope from a modern fantasy story. It's also why so many stories that you see have a major supernatural event set relatively close to the present. Whether it's the revelation of the supernatural world in Trueblood, or the world-shaping alterations that occur in Shadowrun, most of the world's history played out the same way it did in our history books, with a divergent point happening somewhere in the modern era (typically in the 1980s or 1990s, though sometimes later).
But when you go back further than that, you have to change more. And you don't just have to change major world events (such as the necessity for adding necromancy to the Geneva convention if there were Nazi sorcerers raising corpses in the trenches to continue the fighting), but you also need to change the language people do and don't use.
For fantastic examples of this, check out Lindsay Ellis's video Bright: The Apotheosis of Lazy Worldbuilding.
While there are a lot of points made in that video (and you should go watch it) the one I want to hit on is a point that a lot of writers often overlook; if you change history, then you change the culture. You alter the course of events, and that should lead language to develop in different ways, or for particular touchstones to operate differently.
One of the smallest, but most deeply-rooted, examples is when Will Smith's cop character tells his neighbor, "Just crip walk your ass back over to the barbecue."
This statement, especially said by a cop, is a direct reference to the Crips, an infamous street gang. However, for this statement to make sense in-universe that means you needed to have the trans-Atlantic slave trade, leading to the Civil War in America, leading to the exodus of freed slaves from the harsh conditions of the south, leading to the building tide of social concerns that created the Black Panthers, you need the Black Panthers to be destroyed by government actions, and for the Crips to be created to fill that power vacuum. And you need all of that to happen in a world where, apparently, 2,000 years ago the 9 armies of all the various races (elves, humans, and other fantasy creatures) came together to defeat some unspecific Dark Lord.
That's stretching it, to say the least.
Now, that's not the only example we can take from Bright, whose world has fantasy creatures and magic going back even more than the 2,000 years mentioned (unless that was when all fantasy arrived on Earth's doorstep, though the film doesn't say, so we can't assume that). There's the moment Smith says, "Fairy lives don't matter today," which implies the existence of the Black Lives Matter movement, and all the historical precedent that goes into that, including the existence of all of our real-world human racism, which seems weird in a world with half a dozen other fantasy creatures added into the mix for millennia. There's also a moment where Smith yells at an orc, "So take your Shrek-looking ass back to Fiona!" This, of course, implies that somehow Grimm's fairy tales were still written in this world, that the Disney company exists, and that the specific events that led to the creation of Dreamworks still happened, and that they made Shrek in this setting, and that it still became a massive, box office hit.
Which is asking a lot from your audience in terms of believability.
You Can Do It... But Think It Through
I don't want anyone reading through all of that and thinking that it's just not worth the effort of writing modern fantasy without a masquerade, or a relatively recent divergence point. Or that's it's not even worth writing modern fantasy at all, if you have to police every reference your characters make, song they quote, or turn of phrase they use. All of that, though, is part of doing your due diligence when it comes to keeping your setting internally consistent, and minimizing the amount of times your audience asks you questions that your story isn't going to answer.
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| You're the one who decides your own workload. |
With all of that said, though, if it sounds like too much effort to alter the real world with an older divergence point, then it might be worth taking the dramatic step of building your own modern fantasy setting; one that isn't on Earth at all. Especially because this can let you make echoing references, where you have something that is in-context of the setting you've made, but which feels like a reflection of a similar piece of media, turn of phrase, etc., from our real world. For example, replacing the phrase, "Don't take any wooden nickels," with, "Don't take any brass tacks," could refer, in-world, to a name for a coin that's no longer in distribution (a brass tack) from a country your nation was once at war with, and so their currency wasn't accepted (or was considered a sign that you're a sympathizer for their cause) long enough that this became part of the lexicon. Alternatively, if the coins are outdated and no longer in circulation, they might be only used by criminal elements, making them a crime to hold, even if they're valuable in a certain part of society. This would also allow the phrase, "Let's get down to brass tacks," to also be co-opted, as you're discussing a serious, sensitive matter that is not to leave this room.
Just as an example.
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