/lit/ - Literature

>>21741895
Peasants were documented in the domesday book 1085 (at least, peasant households were). Plenty of primitive attempts at census taking were made in medieval times. Much of your reasoning, like I said, is post-hoc retardation. Stuff like equating 12 year olds being in an army - cooking, running errands and tending to equipment - as meaning they were also expected to fight in pitched battles between adult men at arms and adult levies. It just speaks to a fundamental misunderstanding of those societies, where you seize on exceptions in art or true stories then gish gallop them into some sort of Malazan tier gendered military.

Nobody is saying women warriors didn't exist. I said as much in my first post. But they were a statistical anomaly in professional armies. Effectively 0% of every military venture. If women show up, its tied to some exceptional story explaining how they got there in the first place. Like noblewomen larping or an "all hands on deck" siege defense where everyone was on the walls throwing stones and poking at people on ladders.

A lot of fantasy books don't do that, instead having women in every military position, in significant percentages, no explanation given, and expect it not to be blatantly apparent virtue signalling.