Adam Horne
This one is from heavyraines17. "What history meta-joke was your favorite to write, and why was it 'What is a zero?'"
Brandon Sanderson
It was "what is a zero?" I've always been fascinated by-- how could people not have a concept of zero? I can get negative numbers not really making sense, but having no concept of zero as a mathematical concept was really interesting to me. That joke was a lot of fun. Otherwise, it's less -- the jokes I had the most fun with were the 'marketingspeak' jokes in the Interludes. The stuff historically that I had the most fun with were was bringing out some of the things I'd gotten through my research that have been there, present, in the back of my head for a long time.
The fact that people in olden days did not have mouths full of teeth rotting out, which a lot of people assume they did. They wouldn't have straight teeth, but generally our archeological record shows that you might lose a few teeth, but maybe not, because you're not eating a lot of foods that destroy your teeth. Colors and dyes and paints being really vibrant is another things that we often get wrong, particularly when you see a depiction. If you go watch a depiction of any Anglo-Saxon or Viking sort of era thing, what are you gonna see? You're gonna see dark, gritty. You're gonna see lots of browns. You're not gonna see orange. You're not gonna see some of these things that they legit had, and you're not gonna see really good hygiene. A lot of the Vikings in particular had really great hygiene and were not these -- not like we depict them. They were brutal, you did not want to be where a Viking ship can get to you, but there's all these sorts of things that over time, you pick up reading historians' accounts and things like that.
It was really fun to bring some of this into the story.