Basic Trope: A story that takes place in a different time period has situations and character relations suited to the tastes of modern audiences.
- Straight: A story that takes place in the Deep South just after The American Civil War depicts Alice, a Black woman, running a very successful business. None of the other characters blinks.
- Exaggerated:
- Not only does it feature the above situation, but the main characters are a Five-Token Band.
- The depiction of history is so sanitized that all kinds of bigotry and prejudice are glaringly absent.
- Alice is the leader of her town, before the war.
- Alice is successful even though she's also an open lesbian, atheist, and left-handed.
- Downplayed:
- Some subtle hints that Alice might be a lesbian or bisexual are dropped.
- Alice deals with racism of a level that was accurate for the time, but doesn't deal with the degree of sexism that was also normal in that era.
- Alice does well, but the dress shop is "officially" owned and Alice is "employed" by a generous White man who despises racism who is really a silent partner to give a veneer of acceptability to society. This shields her from the worst of the problems as racists can rationalize her as merely a good servant of someone "proper".
- Alice is a Black woman who's dating or married to a White man in a time and place where such interracial relationships would be illegal. Anti-miscegenation sentiments and statutes are only vaguely acknowledged when the couple receives shocked glares and stares from strangers, but nobody actually says or does anything.
- Justified:
- Alice just has such a knack for business that no one cares what color she is or what her genitals look like.
- It's a true story, or Based on a True Story.
- This is an Alternate History story.
- The story takes place in a Wretched Hive setting. One of its very few upsides is that nobody cares who or what anyone is. Deserters, pirates, murderers, thieves, and traitors prowl the city and everyone knows it. Given the amount of "bad people" walking around, nobody is likely to care about lesser issues like some excommunicated clergy marrying two men, even if it would incite a riot in more "respectable" cities. Besides, mocking a pirate captain over his love for men is likely to get you shanked, gutted, and hung up by your intestines on the ship's mast.
- Alice is a time-traveller who used her technology to convince the local populace that she is a God.
- Inverted:
- The story depicts Alice as having lost everything, even implying that she was (somewhat) better off when she was enslaved.
- Alice is a Fish out of Temporal Water from the modern era, and time-travels into a ball, where she gets funny looks for the color of her skin and the fact that she's wearing pants instead of a dress. The guards are also surprised when it turns out she can handle herself in a fight.
- The story is set in modern times, but with all the social mores of the past still relatively unchanged (and with all the same flaws). Alice is still considered to be property in an otherwise modern-looking 21st century.
- The bigotry manages to become historically inaccurate. While people may look down on Alice for being a lesbian in Chicago in The '70s, she couldn't be arrested for that explicitly.
- Subverted:
- Alice is a brothel madam. Most of her girls are young Black women, and most of the clients are sleazy White men.
- Alice is not very well off at the beginning, but she gets married to Bob, a wealthy White man (who happens to be the son of her former owner).
- Alice's Blackness is later revealed to have been based upon a historical misinterpretation. When accounts described her as dark-skinned and from Africa, they meant she was well-tanned and from Boer farmers who immigrated. She was still White and considered as such.
- This is just a fake version of history being told to the in-universe audience. The real version of the history is not ... politically correct.
- Double Subverted:
- She's managed to buy her way into high society, in an era where that would have been extraordinarily difficult for someone like Alice.
- They married for love, and it's shown that Bob clearly cares about her and respects her as a human being. None of their neighbors makes any negative comments about their interracial marriage (which is also a real, legally binding marriage at a time when it wouldn't be), and all characters who do are shown to be less than sympathetic.
- She still gets to do things that any woman at the time, let alone a Black woman, would be unlikely to get to do, and she's still very sympathetic to the audience.
- Parodied: For some bizarre reason, Adolf Hitler is depicted as openly promoting peace and equality between all people.
- Zig-Zagged: An Alternate History mixes various levels. While gender roles are rigidly enforced more appropriate to the 1800s than The '80s, transgender people are accepted regardless of their birth sex. The situation with homosexuality, however, remains about the same.
- Averted:
- Deliberate Values Dissonance: Minorities (be they racial, sexual, religious, or anything else) are just as marginalized in-story as they would have been in Real Life.
- The cast consists entirely of White Male Leads.
- Enforced:
- Artistic License – History
- "We need to make our historical drama more palatable to women, gays, Jews, and people of color. Let's put in a Race Lift or something."
- "Wow! This actress is so awesome, we have to cast her in this role! Sure, we meant that role to go to a White woman, but maybe the audience won't notice (or at least won't mind)."
- "Eh, she's just an extra anyway."
- Minority Show Ghetto
- "I know things were backwards in the past, but I don't really feel comfortable depicting open bigotry in the story, even if doing so would be historically accurate."
- Showing a character in the past with the attitudes they actually would have had carries a high risk of making them Unintentionally Unsympathetic, or even an accidental Politically Incorrect Villain. Even if it's period-accurate, there's some things that a modern audience simply cannot forgive.
- Lampshaded: A note flashes at the beginning noting that casting was done both colorblind and genderblind with minimal line changes, resulting in the politically correct history — with bizarre implications.
- Invoked: Alice finds herself in need of money to feed her family now that she's free. She has a real talent for sewing (in fact, that's what she did as a slave), so she finds a way to get the materials she needs and starts a lucrative dressmaking business. Everyone loves her dresses.
- Exploited:
- Alice uses her place in society to advance civil rights.
- The author is a Politically Correct Villain with the purpose of making revisionist propaganda.
- Deconstructed:
- While everything seems peachy at first, it becomes increasingly clear that something wrong is happening with the timeline. A few anachronisms and inconsistent names start slipping through such as referring to things as lynch mobs metaphorically despite that never happening after the war. It turns out that there is considerable meddling to achieve this tolerant history and it may result in some very nasty side effects far worse than the cognitive dissonance.
- Alternatively, it is shown just how extreme circumstances and efforts would be to force the Antebellum South to accept Alice despite the prejudices of the day and the damage caused by forcing it. Alice has to be a 'successful businesswoman' in the same sense as Al Capone. She may get treated with modern respect, but only because she scares the bejabbers out of everyone.
- Defied: People just aren't ready to accept Alice, so they don't buy her dresses ... and Alice eventually loses her business and goes back to square one.
- Discussed: Bob is a White male Time Traveller from the future who has just met Alice, and they have this exchange:Bob: Alice, uhm, I'm glad to see how accomplished you are ... it's just that—Alice: You thought a Black lady like me wouldn't have had that opportunity?Bob: ...Yes.Alice: I hope I've shown you otherwise, Bob.
- Conversed: "I'm all for expanding opportunities for women and Black people, but you can't do that so easily in an historical movie without breaking my Willing Suspension of Disbelief."
- Played for Laughs: Amy and Ben decide to go the extra mile for their history project by travelling in time. They go to the Old South with their history books to check them for accuracy and break out laughing when they find that Black–White, male–female, and interfaith equality are all the order of the day, contra almost everything it says.
- Played for Drama: Amy and Ben accidentally leave their inaccurate history book behind when they return to their own time — which leads to the events depicted therein coming true because some White male supremacists thought that depiction of their timeline seemed like a Utopia and worked to bring it about.
You and your ahistorical tolerance are perfectly welcome back in Politically Correct History.
