Doing strange things in the name of art

This is what I get for procrastinating by reading old wanks from in the fandom wank wiki. If this post weren’t four years old I would want to argue with this person so badly. Even aside from her peculiar generalizations about “history fanfiction”, gems like this quote make me want to bang my head against a wall.

“Well, could you legitimately call it historical fiction if the person that they are writing about is merely the name of a well-known figure taped onto some completely random person who is entirely not who or what that person was (and, in the case of people who are currently alive, who that person is), or if the events are extremely random and could never have taken place during whatever they are discussing (like a Civil War battle between the United and Confederate Sates in, say, New Mexico)? Historical fiction tends to base around something that could have happened in that time, not "hey, this is a name that everyone knows, I'm going to use his name for my character and have him go wage war in (country that didn't even exist at the time)!"

Considering that there were, in fact, a number of battles fought in the New Mexico territory during the Civil War, this argument really doesn’t help the poster’s credibility. Perhaps someone should inform P. G. Nagle that her historical novels are “extremely random and could never take place”? I have heard of the state of New Mexico being mistaken for the country of Mexico before, but this is the first time that I have seen someone claim that we didn’t exist.