Its not that they're ignored, its just they have no bite. In my tangent upthread I talked about the fetishization of fidelity or authenticity. I perceive these as being inappropriate in the fantasy setting and simply inherited from the historical epic genre which the LotR films were largely mimicking.
This sounds like you're saying that authenticity or consistency in fantasy are unimportant just because it's fantasy.
ALL literary genres have rules. The primary rule is to be consistent in whatever in-universe rules you've set for yourself. This is why there's a cynical fan saying about Star Trek that starships travel not at a consistent set of warp speed factors, but rather at the speed of plot. Sometimes it takes a week or two to get from Earth to the Klingon homeworld. Other times it takes no more than a few hours. It depends on how long the writer has decided the ship needs to take or for the characters to have a conversation.
So the more consistently the rules are applied, the more I respect a work. It's why I do research for my fanfics, rather than making <stuff> up and being called on it later when someone says, "Waitaminute, this doesn't make sense." It's why, if I'm adapting a game to prose and I find plot holes or inconsistencies, I either fix them or find a way to explain them. I don't want to repeat the original mistake in my own work.
The performance is not the fiction. Why do you need this trivia to be accurate?
Not everyone considers the same thing to be trivial. You would not believe the threads of hundreds of pages over on TrekBBS of people arguing over the precise color of Kirk's uniform shirts or the precise color/configuration of a particular model of ship's warp nacelles. I don't care about any of that (well, other than Kirk wearing one shirt when entering a turbolift and a different one when he exits). To me it's trivial, but to others it's something important enough for them to argue about in a thread that spans thousands of posts over a period of several years.
To put it another way, why aren't you grumpy that LotR was not performed in the original Westron? Frodo Baggins actual name is Maura Labingi. It was a conceit of Tolkein's that he had translated an original Westron manuscript and substituted appropriate germanic names in their place.
It was a conceit of Robert Graves' that
I, Claudius was actually Claudius' own real autobiography. The reason it was published in English is because almost nobody who would read it can read Latin. The reading audience knows that, and so do the people who watch the miniseries that was made in the '70s. The audience is meant to understand that Claudius wrote in Latin, and get on with the story.
If there is something I don't understand, its why you value emulating historical fidelity in fictional settings.
Most fictional settings are based in the history of whatever the setting is. You don't find modern cops using the same weapons used in
Bonanza or
Gunsmoke, right? And you don't find Adam Cartwright pulling out a modern weapon when he shoots at a bank robber or cattle rustler.
So it should be that if a work of fantasy is set in medieval times, there should not be any anachronistic elements in it unless there's a purpose to it that fits the story.
Take my own NaNo project, for example. The computer game it's based on screwed up as far as authenticity goes. It's set in the early 11th century, yet there are references to Shakespeare (a quote from
Richard III), the Brothers Grimm (a quote from one of their stories), and one character wears an anachronistic item of clothing. I can only surmise that the people who wrote the script for this game either didn't do their research or they didn't think the people playing the game would know the difference.
Well, I know the difference, and these anachronistic elements annoy me. I don't want to perpetuate an error, so I need to decide if Shakespeare and the Brothers Grimm were born centuries earlier, or if I need to eliminate those parts of the story, or figure out different quotations that would fit the story... and just not have the character wear that particular item of clothing. It hardly matters if he isn't wearing it since he's dead by that point and we just see his corpse lying on the floor. But it does matter to me if it's inaccurate, as period-appropriate costuming is something I became immersed in researching during my time in the Society for Creative Anachronism. If you're going to be incorrect, have a good explanation for it. This game didn't, but my prose adaptation will.
