If you ever find yourself thinking “oh, I can’t write this Cool But Impractical thing into my story, it’s just not realistic”, here are a few perfectly realistic reasons why people and even whole cultures would rather do something in an impractical way rather than the sensible one:
- weird flex
- religious reasons
- religious weird flex (someone decided that they are So Religious that they consider the practical method Sinful, and people got competitive about it)
- tax reasons (some ruler put a tax on doing something the sensible way and people started doing the impractical alternative as a legal loophole)
- someone wildly powerful and popular preferred doing it that way, and everyone adapted to it in order to look cool
- someone wildly unpopular suggested doing the practical thing, and everyone went out of their way to avoid doing that in order to not look uncool
- it just genuinely never occurred to them that there is a better alternative, and their current method has been honed to perfection/adapted to the infrastructure so deeply that at this point altering it wouldn’t be sensible