Phantom fanfic pet peeves

[igenlode]

Why 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.)

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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?

Comments

[watervole]

With you totally on historical fashion. Our heroine would have been out shopping for a new corset, wanting a really modish one, and explaining how useful it was in supporting the back muscles, etc.

[igenlode]

To be honest I think she probably simply wouldn't be thinking about it -- unless she was leaning over a railing and the edge of the boning was digging into her uncomfortably, or something. We don't go round thinking about how constructive our shoes are compared to bare feet, although someone who has never worn shoes might well find his thinking totally dominated by the unaccustomed sensation. I can still remember how long it took me to get used to wearing short socks (where the elastic sits halfway up the swell of the calf) as versus long ones, where the cuff sits snugly in the narrower section just below the knee; I had the constant feeling that there was nothing keeping my socks up, whereas long socks simply can't fall down unless the ribbing gets very stretched indeed.


For an opera singer like Christine, the support of something to push against in front might be something of which she was conscious -- modern singers comment on the advantage of the bodices in 'period' costumes in that respect, and I've found that a firm belt has a similar effect; you can actively brace the diaphragm (or at least the stomach muscles) against it, as it were. On the other hand, male singers managed perfectly well without any such assistance (well, most of them!), so it's obviously not that essential.

But most of the time I think the heroine wouldn't be explaining anything, because a presumed audience of contemporaries would already know. It's the old problem of the info-dump in historical fiction: how do you tell the reader things that the narrator takes for granted?
I've just been reading Mary Renault's "Fire From Heaven", and it's not until several scenes in when some foreigners (Persian envoys) arrive, and the protagonist observes their alien legs encased in 'tubes' of cloth, that it dawns upon the reader that all the native Greek characters have presumably been bare-legged all along (and bare-arsed under their tunics no doubt!)