You get that sort of anachronism in any fandom, to be honest. It's just not always as glaring. I've mostly been involved in scifi and fantasy fandoms, and you always end up with professionals acting like children. Usually I chalk it up to young writers who haven't figured out how adults act, but sometimes it's just adults writing stupid plots.
The idea of doing research is both very modern and very sophisticated thought. I read through all of Austen's novels in junior high, and I suspect if I'd been writing JA fics back then, they'd have had London pump rooms and all sorts of nonsense. It wouldn't have occurred to me to research. In the last five or six years, I've written a massive amount of historical fiction in a couple different fandoms (alternate settings of the aforementioned scifi), and now it's really not anything for me to spend a few hours on three consecutive evenings chasing down information on how cannons were made in the 1600s.
The good thing is that there's so much information available now. I was plodding through Sherlock Holmes a couple years ago, and there was a footnote regarding some truly ridiculous descriptions of lush, green hills and river valleys in Utah - in the nineteenth century, one wasn't expected to research things. The footnote included a reference to Puccini's Manon Lescaut, in which the heroine wanders out and dies in the desert. Outside New Orleans. So I suppose it could be worse.
(As for the oldest fandom, I believe that there were Hobbit/Lord of the Rings 'zines before Star Trek. I know I've heard of publications as early as the 1950s.)
The idea of doing research is both very modern and very sophisticated thought. I read through all of Austen's novels in junior high, and I suspect if I'd been writing JA fics back then, they'd have had London pump rooms and all sorts of nonsense. It wouldn't have occurred to me to research. In the last five or six years, I've written a massive amount of historical fiction in a couple different fandoms (alternate settings of the aforementioned scifi), and now it's really not anything for me to spend a few hours on three consecutive evenings chasing down information on how cannons were made in the 1600s.
The good thing is that there's so much information available now. I was plodding through Sherlock Holmes a couple years ago, and there was a footnote regarding some truly ridiculous descriptions of lush, green hills and river valleys in Utah - in the nineteenth century, one wasn't expected to research things. The footnote included a reference to Puccini's Manon Lescaut, in which the heroine wanders out and dies in the desert. Outside New Orleans. So I suppose it could be worse.
(As for the oldest fandom, I believe that there were Hobbit/Lord of the Rings 'zines before Star Trek. I know I've heard of publications as early as the 1950s.)