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Phantom fanfic pet peeves
6 March 2021 12:51 amWhy do people write 'Messieur' instead of 'Monsieur'?
Why do they have absolutely no idea about how titles work in English, let alone in French? (Hint: they're geographical. You can't be 'Duke Wellesley' -- or even 'Sir Drinkwater'.)
Why does Raoul always live in 'Chagny Manor', when the French don't have manor houses, the house described is never anything like a manor, and manors are also geographical rather than having family names tacked on the front?
Why do they keep inserting inappropriate modern slang into the characters' mouths alongside laborious attempts to prove how 'period-accurate' their social attitudes are? (NB: 19th-century French characters did not think of themselves as 'Victorian' -- why would they care about the English Queen? -- and they certainly didn't walk around monologuing about oppressive 'Victorian' beliefs and clothing; they saw themselves as modern and in general more enlightened than anything that had come before them. Nobody in the 1960s talked about 'Sixties attitudes', for example -- they talked about 'modern attitudes', whether with disapproval or satisfaction.)
I suspect the answer to most of these is that the authors all copy each other in a game of Chinese whispers, just as they all crib the same bad sex motifs because they don't have any experience in that department either... but what exactly is the point of those unbearably cutesy titles all in lower case? Are they supposed to represent some kind of hashtag communication, or just a postmodern attitude to punctuation?
Why do they have absolutely no idea about how titles work in English, let alone in French? (Hint: they're geographical. You can't be 'Duke Wellesley' -- or even 'Sir Drinkwater'.)
Why does Raoul always live in 'Chagny Manor', when the French don't have manor houses, the house described is never anything like a manor, and manors are also geographical rather than having family names tacked on the front?
Why do they keep inserting inappropriate modern slang into the characters' mouths alongside laborious attempts to prove how 'period-accurate' their social attitudes are? (NB: 19th-century French characters did not think of themselves as 'Victorian' -- why would they care about the English Queen? -- and they certainly didn't walk around monologuing about oppressive 'Victorian' beliefs and clothing; they saw themselves as modern and in general more enlightened than anything that had come before them. Nobody in the 1960s talked about 'Sixties attitudes', for example -- they talked about 'modern attitudes', whether with disapproval or satisfaction.)
I suspect the answer to most of these is that the authors all copy each other in a game of Chinese whispers, just as they all crib the same bad sex motifs because they don't have any experience in that department either... but what exactly is the point of those unbearably cutesy titles all in lower case? Are they supposed to represent some kind of hashtag communication, or just a postmodern attitude to punctuation?
