I've noticed a lot of people responding to my Frozen/Tangled debunking with some variant of "But it must have taken place in at least 1790/1890/1828 because it has Mozart/tandem bicycles/cupcakes!" and I wanted to address how this approach to dating fictional works is misguided.
Quite simply, it is making the mistake of dating fiction the way you would date actual historical documents. In real life, any single item may provide a minimum date because that item would have to exist in the real world in order to appear. So, a historic photo with a single item from 100 years later than the rest of the material would definitively date it to at least the later time period (i.e., meaning it's a fake). However, the same does not hold true for fiction, because we already know it's a fake...that's what fiction means! In fiction, it is more correct to take the overall appearance of the work and the predominant themes of costume, architecture, technology, and trappings to set a time period that the author probably intended. Remember we're looking for *intent* here, rather than when something actually happened (if we're looking for items to definitively date something in reality, that's trivially easy: Tangled is from 2010 and Frozen is from 2013).
