>>119632818>>119632827>>119632856To be clear I am not an an actual academic or researcher, i'm a hobbyist.
I really don't wanna jerk myself off, there's still a ton I don';t know, but if I had to make a comparison, I'd say I'm probably comparably informed to a graduate student with the caveat that as i'm not in actual academia so my knowledge is more generalized across many different Mesoamerican cultures and facets of society vs a graduate student honing in on a specific topic, and that I can't read Spanish so I rely more on English translations then a lot of people otherwise as informed as me or graduate students would
Also "great" is underselling it, Onyx Equinox's level of historical and cultural authenticity is phenomenal. I wouldn't say "flawless", since there are occasional nitpicks, but there's like 40 things the show does right for every one of those nitpicks, and said nitpicks are for really obscure, minor things, and they usually come from a place of still at least trying and just not quite getting it right, rather apathy/not trying at all.
It's really hard to overstate how much research, effort, and familarity with the subject matter there is with how the show uses historical, visual, and cultural themes and motifs. Some of the connections are super obscure and well thought out: For example, the Gate to the underworld appearing in the Cenote, when Cenotes were seen as entranced to the underworld, and the iconography of the gate resembles Maya logograms for mirrors or caves or Olmec depictions of caves, or Maya characters for smoke, when mirrors were also associated with portals to the spirtual world (and smoke with mirrors), as were caves, etc.
Or how a lot of the women in Danibaan (which is Zapotec) were wearing Quechquemitl (see pic) which in, say, Aztec society were reserved for ceremonial garb, but for the civilizations in Oaxaca like the Mixtec and Zapotec were more widely worn as just a normal garment for high status women.
