one thing i kinda love is all the elaborate framing devices of fiction from a couple centuries ago.

when published fiction was still a new enough thing that most authors felt like they still had to present it as if it was a true story, with context and citations and stuff

like they thought maybe the readers of the time wouldn’t be able to suspend disbelief, if the story just dropped them into the middle of claiming that a bunch of things happened, without the author explaining how they supposedly knew all that

so you’d get a whole introduction about how the author found this manuscript for sale as a handwritten journal from a mysterious book-vendor in a night market in some remote village… Or maybe it was a story recounted to them over several months of dinners with their friend B—-, to whom it really happened, but whose name is getting censored with a bunch of dashes for his privacy and also so you don’t get your suspension of disbelief broken by seeing a name that you could look up and find out if it’s actually a real person or not

the time when authors were still struggling to establish the ground rules of consensual lying. The time when novels were an actual novelty. What a concept.