27-09-2022, 07:21 AM
One might argue though that the castle isn't merely "European", it's somewhat political. This depends on the extent to which swallowtail merlons were still seen (in the 15th century) as a symbol rather than a merely architectural feature, something we still haven't quite figured out.
In the alien analogy, I would probably need to revert to the tropes of the sci-fi genre. And that is another argument against the exotic theory: Europeans were pretty familiar with orientalization. They'd give a man a curved sword, some fancy headgear...
But in the VM, I'm not sure if we see any attempt to make the thing look foreign by including things that were generally seen as foreign. This can even be said of the script, which contains mostly glyphs familiar to Latin scribes. Although the gallows may be seen as an exception, and I'm not even sure about that.
In the alien analogy, I would probably need to revert to the tropes of the sci-fi genre. And that is another argument against the exotic theory: Europeans were pretty familiar with orientalization. They'd give a man a curved sword, some fancy headgear...
But in the VM, I'm not sure if we see any attempt to make the thing look foreign by including things that were generally seen as foreign. This can even be said of the script, which contains mostly glyphs familiar to Latin scribes. Although the gallows may be seen as an exception, and I'm not even sure about that.